


The Weight of Lies (Heavy Like Stones)

by not_here_leave_a_message



Category: Motherland: Fort Salem (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Raylla never met at Fort Salem, Camp X-Ray inspired AU, Eventual Raelle Collar/Scylla Ramshorn, Eventual Redemption, F/F, Follows most of canon with some exceptions, For example there are no Camarilla, It's a slow burn because it takes two whole fics to culminate, Like she's in a terrorist prison for a reason., Scylla is very much Mall Girl in this one., Slow Burn, They actually don't get together in this fic because it wouldn't make any sense, but they do get together in the sequel, this is just laying the groundwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 39,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25205719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_here_leave_a_message/pseuds/not_here_leave_a_message
Summary: Fresh from War College and immediately assigned to Cotton Mather Detention Camp - the military's "top secret" detention center for dangerous terrorists - Raelle just wants to keep her head down, serve her six months, and return to her unit at Fort Salem.  But one detainee with piercing blue eyes, dark hair, a silver tongue, and a hidden agenda just can't seem to let her do that.A Motherland: Fort Salem AU fic inspired, in no small part, by the 2014 film Camp X-Ray.
Relationships: Raelle Collar/Scylla Ramshorn
Comments: 326
Kudos: 373





	1. Corey Isle

**Author's Note:**

> Well hello! Thanks for clicking on this fic! I've been working on this since before the show even ended, because the way that they started to depict Scylla sort of reminded me of the film Camp X-Ray (if you haven't seen it, it's got Kristen Stewart in it and deals with a US soldier stationed at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center learning, via her interactions with one of the detainees, that no issue, especially in war, is truly black and white).
> 
> No major warnings apply to this fic, but just be aware that in this fic:  
> -Scylla is mall girl (I know they've explicitly implied this in canon, but I also know that people think they may change it).  
> -There will be scenes in which gore is mentioned: I'll add a warning for those.  
> -Because it takes place in a prison for suspected/convicted terrorists, abuses of power are mentioned/torture is heavily implied/explicitly stated at points but not described in detail.  
> -The title Specialist is given to people who have been in the US Army between 2-3 years (I looked it up but I don't claim to be an expert and who knows how Eliot will have the rankings in-canon, so this was the compromise for me). War College lasts two years in this fic so that's why a lot of people have the title.  
> -This is one of two fics: there is a sequel because I couldn't leave you guys without Raylla. They and we deserve nice things. And before you all become worried that the sequel will never see the light of day: it's already written.  
> -This fic is also completed.
> 
> This is unbeta-d so all mistakes are my own. I like to live dangerously, what can I say. I don't own the characters/show/etc., I just really love Scylla and I really love the Bellweather Unit, so. 
> 
> Enjoy!

If there was one thing Raelle Collar couldn’t stand about the military, it was the starkness of it all. Everything always ordered, numbered, accounted for. Bland, reduced to nothing more than necessity. Concrete with paint slathered over it to make it not feel as cold, but it always felt that way anyway. Like the room she found herself in: Classroom 24B, situated in the basement of Administration Building 1 at Cotton Mather Detention Camp. She’d arrived the night before on Corey Isle, where the camp was situated, and had quickly connected to Tally and Abigail to let them know she’d arrived safely. 

“I still can’t believe they sent you there. And without us, that’s so fucked up,” Abigail had ranted, and Raelle nodded in agreement. It had been fucked up. 

Raelle’d gotten the notification 48 hours before she was scheduled to leave Fort Salem, and only three hours after she’d officially graduated from War College. It had seemed…an odd time, and an odd assignment, which had led to theorizing well into the night with her unit about why she had been assigned to, what was apparently considered in military circles, according to Abigail, the “worst grunt work possible”. 

“I mean, it’s fine and even required if you’re going to be an Interrogator, but you’re not?” she’d reiterated on their call. “I just don’t understand. And on top of that, we’re on paper duty!”

It came out as a whine, because Abigail hated paper duty, and Raelle couldn’t blame her.

“Well, sorry about that,” Raelle muttered sarcastically.

“Glad you made it safely though, Rae,” Tally piped up.

Raelle had smiled softly to herself, “Thanks, Tal.”

“How does it seem?”

“Fine, honestly. Just an island in the middle of nowhere, but I guess that’s the point of a high security prison, huh?”

Truth be told, Raelle hadn’t known that Cotton Mather Detention Camp was a real place. It sounded…fake. She wasn’t surprised to learn about it, and apparently to those raised in military families, it was actually well-known. But Raelle’s hadn’t been a military family, so she’d missed the memo on the Army’s detention center for known terrorists. 

Not even known ones: the worst ones. 

It was where the most dangerous criminals went to be interrogated and then, quite possibly: to disappear.

“Well, I guess just make the best of it,” Tally said, trying to be optimistic. 

Raelle sighed, “Yeah. I mean, it’s just six months, right?”

“And then get your ass back here so I can actually blast something, I’m going to go absolutely crazy here. Don’t make me wait longer than absolutely necessary, shitbird,”

Raelle rolled her eyes but chuckled, “Like I have any control over that, High Atlantic,” she shot back. 

“Keep us posted,”

“Yeah, I will. Try not to go too crazy,”

“No guarantees.”

Once Raelle disconnected their call, she’d sighed to herself. One good thing about a solo deployment: there was no way for her unit to get hurt. She loved them, and they loved her, more than any of them cared to admit. It was bound to happen: after all the shit they’d had to go through and deal with in Basic, and then in War College. She wouldn’t have survived without them: especially considering her death wish when she’d first arrived at Fort Salem.

So yeah, in a way…she almost preferred this. Her unit was safe, and she herself was now on an isolated island, in the middle of the Atlantic, with subdued terrorists, high-ranking military officials, and, apparently, Interrogators, so it wasn’t like she was in any immediate danger, either. Not to mention the others who had been flown in with her for their first-ever rotation at Cotton Mather: Raelle wasn’t alone and none of them were on the frontlines. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

They’d mostly all arrived in separate helicopters, likely from different bases. Raelle’s Fort Salem chopper had seven other people in it and a whole hell of a lot of cargo. Upon arrival, she realized that the group of fresh meat to Cotton Mather was clearly fairly large, groups of similar size to hers piling out of their respective birds. They’d gathered them all outside of the helipads to welcome them to the fort and give room assignments and schedule call times before dismissing them to the barracks.

And then, first thing, bright and early: Orientation in Classroom 24B, 08:00. She was early but not the first to arrive, and she took a seat near the back of the bare room. There was nothing there except their desks, a cabinet, and a whiteboard. The walls were painted white and everything was lit with fluorescents, making the room feel too bright and making Raelle squint. 

The desks were small and there was a map, an orientation packet in a plain manila folder, and a pencil provided. Raelle picked hers up and twirled it absentmindedly in her hand, taking in others as they walked in. 

Their orientation leader arrived at 08:00 sharp and introduced herself as Lieutenant Graves. 

“Welcome to Cotton Mather Detention Camp, Specialists,” Graves addressed them, “Today marks the first day of your six month rotation. This orientation is designed to get you familiar with life here at Cotton Mather. Tomorrow, you have your orientation around Camp Terminer. If you are here to become an Interrogator, you will have a secondary tour of Camp Oyer. After that, your weekly assignments kick in, and you start your six months. You will be taking on ten hour overlapping shift rotations: one hour for prep, eight hours of work, one hour for reports. Two days off a week. Your schedules will be provided to you tomorrow,”

Standard. Raelle stomped more out of habit than anything as the rest of the women in the room with her did the same. 

“First thing is first, get to know the layout of the compound. We house only the deadliest and most dangerous of terrorists here, and they are a crafty bunch. While they wear collars that neutralize their spoken magic, and we employ many other tactics to ensure they remain magically incapable of any harm to us, rebellion holds many forms and hate is all they know. They will try to harm you in ways you cannot even imagine nor fathom: with nothing but time on their hands, they can get very creative. You will be assigned a partner for rounds, and you and your partner must check in periodically with others on your wing,” Graves looked at them all pointedly, and Raelle glanced around the room, briefly wondering who her partner might end up being. 

Graves continued on, uncapping a marker and starting in on the nitty-gritty. It was all fairly self-explanatory. Cotton Mather was a high-security prison, now bustling with the recent rise of the Spree terrorist threat. It was situated on Corey Isle. They went over their maps: the Terminer Camp in the shape of a five-pointed star, each leg representing a “wing” which had been given a color depending on how cooperative the detainees held within it were. Oyer Camp, a much smaller compound shaped like a simple X situated to the north-east of Terminer, and farther north still was where they were: the administration buildings, barracks and mess halls, recreation areas, helipads, the works. The island itself was surrounded by nothing but sheer cliffs, so swimming wasn’t exactly advised, which was a joke that Graves cracked and actually made Raelle snort. 

For orientation, it was all standard. Layout, schedules, safety precautions, breach precautions, security measures, and a comprehensive list of every single weapon available to them and the express assurance that they absolutely were allowed to use force against detainees if threatened. Followed by protocol for what could constitute a threat, the necessary paperwork that needed to be filed before, during, and after each shift. 

Then, how to interact with detainees (“Numbers only! Do not address a detainee with anything besides their number. They will tell you their names, they will ask for yours. Do not interact besides giving orders and beyond what is absolutely necessary for basic communications.”)

They went through the entire orientation packet, which was exactly as mind-numbingly boring yet necessary as it seemed like it would be, and topped it all off with a list of new seeds that they would have to learn for use at Cotton Mather: anything from opening security doors to binding a loose detainee. 

Standard, but it didn’t exactly paint a great picture of their coming months, and Raelle folded her arms to herself back at her barracks, annoyed. The orientation was obviously necessary: there was a lot to cover and Graves was…well, gravely serious about the work that they would be facing, and Raelle understood why. Still, she almost still felt like war meat, but rather than being sent to fight terrorists, she was babysitting them. It was clearly a way for the Army to keep her out of the way: to keep her in check. To show her what they were fighting for, and against.

But she already knew: that was the issue she had with it. The Spree had been getting more and more ruthless, including that massive mall attack on her Conscription day, and the attack on the cruise ship during Basic, not to mention that little balloon stunt they’d pulled during the Belleweather wedding that had thankfully ended with no casualties and nothing more than confusion. And then the Spree mobile armory during City Drop that had almost seen Raelle and her unit dead, and that had caused the death of more than one cadet. 

Raelle sighed to herself, exhausted, and pointedly ignored her new roommate in her barracks in favor of letting her mind ponder all of what she had learned.

And she got to learn even more tomorrow.

Joy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's Chapter 1, I hope you enjoyed it! Comments boost my confidence and kudos are always nice, so hope you'll consider leaving one or the other (or both!) :) But thanks for reading, it's appreciated!


	2. Mobile Library

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! First off, thank you so much for all the reviews/kudos/people who stopped by to read the fic, it's all greatly appreciated! 
> 
> Just a few things of note for this fic that I forgot to mention in the first chapter's notes:
> 
> -Raelle's mom actually did die in Liberia in this fic. It happened at the same time as her "death" did in canon.  
> -One of you mentioned it in the comments but just to clarify: Raelle and Scylla haven't met at Fort Salem in this, nope! They'll have their first meeting in Cotton Mather.  
> -In an attempt to make this reflect a bit more how the US military operates in general, in this AU there are multiple bases set up around the country (this comes into play more in the sequel than here, but still something to know!). I don't recall if this is ever discussed in canon or if everyone just goes to Fort Salem or what, but for this there are different bases, especially for after Basic: Glory was on one of those different ones so Raelle and Glory haven't met before, either. I just really think Glory's adorable so I wanted her somewhere in this, and I think her general personality works best for scenes I have later in the fic. 
> 
> Think that's all! Another unbeta-d chapter, all mistakes are my own, I don't own anything, etc.
> 
> Enjoy!

At the end of their second day of Orientation, in which she and the others got a detailed tour of the entirety of Camp Terminer, she was partnered with a bubbly young Specialist, Glory Moffet - a Specialist out of Marblehead, a Fort Salem off-shoot for Fliers - who bounced up to Raelle with a springy step and massive smile, holding out her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Specialist Collar!” she’d said, with far too much energy for Raelle’s tastes. Still, Raelle forced down her inherent grumpiness to at least be pleasant to Moffet, if distant. The woman was bouncy and reminded her almost too much of Tally, so despite her sunny disposition, Raelle decided that she liked her.

They were fitted afterward for their guard uniforms, which were decidedly more Civilian Army than their standard garb, including full green camouflage, reinforced Kevlar collars, and many more pockets that held stuff like their mace and handcuffs, among other things. Raelle knew she was going to sweat her ass off in all of the gear, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. And she wasn’t wrong as she reported for her first day of duty the next morning, the sweat already beading on her arms as she pulled on the guard fatigues.

Specialist Moffet was just as much of a ray of sunshine first thing in the morning, her smile almost as bright as the fluorescents. 

“Hey partner!” Specialist Moffet greeted, far too chipper considering their assignment for the day. 

“Hey,” Raelle muttered in response, squinting against the harsh light. 

“Ready for the day?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Raelle said simply, and Moffet nodded, making light conversation and asking get-to-know-you questions that Raelle responded to half-heartedly while she observed the room from one of the provided benches. She recognized a few people from orientation, but there were definitely new faces. People on their second or third tour, she imagined, from the practiced ease with which they joked with each other and put their gear on. They were all familiar with each other. 

She and Glory, as Moffet insisted on Raelle calling her outside of their rounds (“Raelle, we’re going to be here, working together, for six months, I’m not going to let you call me Specialist Moffet for all of it, it’s a mouthful.”) exchanged a look as everyone finished up putting on their uniforms and straightened, awaiting for the doors of the changing room to open and release them into the prison.

And really, it actually wasn’t all that bad, to start with. Her first two weeks, she and Glory were assigned to Gray Wing: the wing with the most “cooperative” and “friendly” of the terrorists. Detainees who had bargained secrets for lax restrictions, communal cells, and special privileges like TV time and communal breakfasts in Terminer's Mess Hall. Of the wings, Gray was the easiest, and Raelle realized that while she adjusted to the simple but rigid schedule and detainees who knew the rules and followed them, happy in their cushy version of high-security prison. 

Yellow Wing felt a bit more like an actual prison, two detainees per cell and much more restriction in their activities (no communal breakfast for them, and certainly no TV time). The yellow doors were a shade too bright and stood out against the white-painted walls, and it hurt Raelle’s eyes. The detainees were…well, she wouldn’t want to say pleasant, but they didn’t cause any problems and also followed protocol, the threat of losing privileges enough to keep them in line. 

Not that Raelle was complaining, her whole two weeks in Yellow. She preferred compliant prisoners to the obstinate, uncooperative detainees in Orange Wing. Oranges weren’t allowed to leave their cells except for shower time and recreation time, once a day, and honestly, that was enough for Raelle. She and Moffet had to move prisoners individually for those occasions, and it wasn’t exactly Raelle’s definition of fun. Thankfully, none of the prisoners really fought them or any of the other guards on duty with them, though they did like to lash out verbally. 

Raelle largely ignored them, and she noticed that Moffet did as well, which was a bit of contrast to how she had been in Gray and Yellow: her usual, bubbly self surprisingly blank and stoic in Orange. 

They got switched to Kitchen after their two weeks in Orange, and Raelle couldn’t help but relax a bit, on kitchen duty. It almost felt like an entirely different place, tucked away beyond Terminer’s Mess Hall, and all it really amounted to was peeling potatoes and listening to others talk. Of her rotations, Raelle decided that she liked Kitchen the best. The most annoying thing about it was that they also were on dishwashing duty, which meant a lot of counting of silverware, which only the Grays were even allowed to use, but Raelle could handle it. 

“And then he said he would peel off my skin, so Kaleigh tased him,” someone who had been at Raelle’s orientation recounted a confrontation that had happened to her the week before in Orange. 

The same week that Raelle and Glory had been rotated to Kitchen. 

“That’s crazy, what did Graves say?”

“Nothing, and Hobbs said it was the right thing to do, so,” the storyteller shrugged. 

“Wow, glad that didn’t happen when we were there!” Glory piped up from where she was, sat next to Raelle and peeling potatoes. 

Raelle felt Glory nudge her, “Right, Raelle? Could you imagine?”

“I’m sure Potsdam would have absolutely maced his eyes out,” Raelle muttered, which earned a few laughs despite that not being her intention. Truthfully, she didn’t know what she would have done in that situation, mostly because it seemed a little unnecessary to be forceful, but then again, they were talking about Detainee Thirty-six, who was a large man. Even handcuffed, Raelle wouldn’t want to take him in a fight, and he was very hostile, for an Orange. He’d probably be moved to Red if he kept it up…

“Did you guys hear-”

A loud bang from the kitchen door being opened interrupted the gossip, and everyone turned to see Lt. Hobbs, dressed in her full guard gear. “Collar, Moffet,” she barked, upon seeing them, “Get changed, full gear. There’s been an incident, I need you two on mobile library duty tonight. May as well introduce you to Red Wing before you start there next week. Suit up, meet us in the Mess. Goldenrod will show you how the mobile library works,”

She left without so much as waiting for a confirmation: orders were orders, after all. Raelle rolled her eyes to herself but stood nonetheless. Glory followed suit. 

“I wonder what happened?” was the only thing she said as they arrived at the locker room and pulled on their guard fatigues.

Raelle shrugged. “Nothing good,” she guessed, and Glory paled. 

\---

Goldenrod, Raelle realized, had been at orientation with them. She nodded as they entered. She’d been paired with, if Raelle remember correctly…a woman named Weisswald. Who clearly wasn’t around. 

Raelle sent a sidelong glance at Glory, who returned the look warily. 

“Hey. Specialist Goldenrod,” she introduced herself, reaching out to shake hands with them. 

“Specialist Moffet,” Glory greeted, clearly trying not to look nervous at the sudden change of plans. 

“Specialist Collar,” Raelle shook the offered hand. 

“Sorry for the sudden change, I know you guys were on Kitchen. I loved Kitchen, that was my first assignment here. Pretty easy,”

“Definitely,” Glory agreed. 

“But, um. Well. Mobile library,” she gestured at the books, the same ones Raelle had seen for her first two weeks with Gray Wing, when she’d taken detainees to their social time. “Pretty self-explanatory. We have this cart, we fill it with books. Reds can only have one book at a time, and any returned book has to be thoroughly swept. Any missing pages, any detected magic, even rips or half-pages, all have to be documented and reported. Since that stabbing not too long ago, even a hair out of place when it comes to books has to be swiftly dealt with.” 

Goldenrod swallowed, looking a bit shaken for a moment, before taking a deep breath and continuing, “But yeah, just make sure we check books and note if anything’s out of place. Everything needs to be exact when we get it back, we’ll check the logs to make sure that as we receive it, is how we gave it. This is the ledger of what’s currently out, and who has it,” Goldenrod held up a ledger that was chained to the cart and flipped it to a diagram of the cells, each one marked with a number, a title, and a date. “Each ledger page has number of a detainee with the list of imperfections of the book we last gave them. Makes it easy to check them when you get them back. Sometimes, the detainees are done and ready for a new book within a day, but they’re allowed to hold onto a book for up to a month. 

“Anyway. It’s all rather straight-forward, just tedious. I’ll be walking with you guys. Granada and Thistle are our superiors, they’re standing guard at both entrances tonight, and Spellman and Pyewacket are the roamers who check each cell at random intervals. We probably won’t be speaking with them, they’re all pretty stoic. Veterans of Red Wing, I guess you could say,” she shrugged, “Pyewacket and Thistle are the only ones in there right now, though. Besides us, but with the three of us and them, we should be fine.”

Well, that didn’t bode well, and Raelle felt her eyebrow rise despite herself. 

“Anyway, this is our list,” she waved the ledger. “And, I guess…that’s really it. Let’s get started.”

They walked to the Red Wing via the secure throughway that surrounded the recreation area.

“Isn’t it a bit late for them to be having mobile library?” Glory wondered, out loud. 

Goldenrod shrugged, “Not really. Reds don’t really have a schedule. Not like the others, and definitely not like Gray and Yellow,”

Glory sent Raelle a worried glance, and Raelle shrugged. It wasn’t really too late, nearly 21:00. Raelle knew from their first week in Kitchen that meals went out at all times of day, and since Orange had been ones to eat fairly late, it only made sense that the overnight meals were going to Reds. She couldn’t say why, but there had to be some kind of reason for feeding them so late. If they were ever only let outside once during the day, maybe it didn’t really matter to their internal clocks what time it was. They never really got to see time pass. She knew from orientation that cells in Red didn’t have any windows. So perhaps, to them, the late schedule wasn’t late at all. Just their norm. 

“Right,” Goldenrod said, as they waved their badges and quietly sang their seed to unlock the security door into Red. “So, it goes like this. Mobile library is also social hour. We knock on all of the doors and announce that it’s mobile library, and tell them to stand back. They have to tell you ‘Clear’, and then you can open the window cover. They’re not supposed to get close to the door, or to us, at any point. Doing so can be combatted with mace or spray. They’re collared, but they can be hostile. We only ask them if they would like a new book, that’s it. They’ll be difficult about it, and they’ll try to trick you into giving them two books, or claim they don’t have one when they do. Always triple-check the log. 

“If they decide they want a new book, you open the meal slot. It doubles as the book slot. This is the only time they can come anywhere close to the door, to retrieve the book after you slide it through. Scan it immediately: don’t even touch it until you’ve made sure it’s not tampered with. If it’s good, take it and then slide the new book they asked for into the slot. You’ll be repeating yourself a lot, they like to ask you to tell them every book on the shelf because they like to waste our time. You don’t have to do it, especially because all of their window slots are open so they can hear you. If they don’t listen the first time, that’s their fault. But they’ll try to trip you up in all different ways, it’s what they do. Just remember that you’re in control here, not them. Are you ready?”

Raelle nodded and Glory sucked in a breath of air. 

Goldenrod nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that! Next chapter is where we'll meet Scylla, I'll get it up as soon as I've taken a good look at it for proofreading: should be a few days maximum. Tbh I'm hoping to have updates on this once or twice a week (it'll depend on my schedule and a few other factors): like I said the whole thing is done so really it just depends on editing. 
> 
> Thanks for reading (and for all the interest in the fic)! :)


	3. Detainee Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Thank you again for all the reviews and kudos, etc. They make my day! 
> 
> Things to note in this chapter:  
> -Harry Potter was the series they also used in the Camp X-Ray film, so despite everything with the author, I've kept it in (but I've changed which book the detainee is asking for because tbh it fits the narrative better later on). I did try searching various other books but tbh this one just fit too well, but just know Scylla and I both say trans rights. 
> 
> I think that's it, so I hope you enjoy! Same deal as always, no beta, none of the characters/etc. are mine, etc.

One by one, they went down the hall, spread out, each at their own door but visible to each other. Raelle felt her heart hammering in her chest, startled that she was actually, genuinely nervous. A new feeling: she hadn’t felt like that on her tour of Red during orientation, nor had she really been dreading Red as her and Moffet’s next assignment, but now that she was actually there – and Goldenrod’s assigned partner wasn’t – well, it didn’t bode well. 

She knocked on the cell door, the sound muffled. 

“Harder,” Goldenrod said, nodding encouragingly. “They’re sound-proofed, you need to really whale on ‘em.”

Raelle nodded and opened her palm, slamming it flat on the door a few times. This time, it rang out, loud and clear, into the cell. “Mobile Library, stand back!” she shouted, just slightly out of time with the other two. 

A scuffle and then a moment later, a muffled “Clear,” and Raelle pulled open the trap door that covered the opening. 

“You’re new,” deadpanned the woman on the other side. Dressed in a red detainee uniform, she had her arms folded tight, a sneer on her face, and a thick, woven wire collar on that covered nearly her entire neck. It didn’t look particularly comfortable.

Raelle said nothing, clenching her jaw and moving forward, following the others down the hall, banging on doors and opening slots, one at a time, until they’d traipsed the entirety of the hall and it was filled with reverberating shouts of inmates.

“New meat,” was among one of many jeers, others calling out to check if their friends were still around. 

Raelle, Glory, and Goldenrod made their way back to the cart full of books and started working their way down the hall. 

“New book?” she asked, and detainee after detainee did nothing more than sneer at her, or curse at her. 

“Okay,” she muttered to herself, checking the log with each new door. 

She walked up to yet another red door, already annoyed by all the din of the prisoners yelling at each other, their laughs bouncing off the walls. It was going to give Raelle a headache. 

Raelle checked the log:

Thirteen: _To Kill a Mockingbird_.

Under it was the date they’d issued it to Detainee Thirteen (yesterday), and Raelle flipped the ledger to Thirteen’s page. Raelle looked at the relatively long list of imperfections, like dog-ears and various page tears that she’d have to check for in _To Kill a Mockingbird_. She rolled her eyes, already annoyed.

“Thirteen,” Raelle said loudly, to be heard over the din, staring down at the page of the ledger and frowning.

“Sixteen-hundred, actually,” a quiet voice said, and Raelle looked up, squinting. Stood on the other side, far enough from the door so as to not cause concern but still closer than she was probably supposed to be, a woman about Raelle’s height stood with a smirk on her face and mirth and malice dancing in her striking blue eyes in equal measure. Like the other detainees, she had a thick collar around her neck that almost blended with the color of her dark hair. 

Raelle glanced down, puzzled. Thirteen was definitely the number: it was on the diagram and the actual page for the detainee. But indeed…written under all the information, “1600” had been handwritten, penned in, as though it were an afterthought. But the detainee didn’t know that, so Raelle played dumb. Even if this detainee did have two numbers, per her records, Thirteen was the correct one. 

“I have Thirteen,” she said flatly, and looked up in time to see the detainee shrug.

“You’re new here. Thirteen is my official number, but everyone calls me Sixteen-hundred. It’s a nickname, from Lt. Graves,”

“Why does she call you that?” Raelle asked while raising an eyebrow, curious despite herself, and it earned her another shrug.

“I suspect it’s because she doesn’t like me,” and the goddamned detainee actually winked. 

Raelle blinked. “What’s not to like, a terrorist in a cell. Seems like a good thing to me,” Raelle deadpanned. 

The woman cocked her head.

“So it would seem,”

“Do you need a new book, Thirteen?”

“Yes,”

“Okay, I’ll need _To Kill a Mockingbird_ back,”

“Of course,” she smiled complacently, pulling her hands out from where they’d been behind her back. She took one step forward, careful, her gaze never leaving Raelle’s. Never wavering, and it was honestly a bit unsettling, but Raelle forced down the feeling as she opened the slot and the detainee pushed the book through. 

Raelle held her hand over it, whispering a quiet seed to check for any work or traps, and when none came back, she took the book. 

“What would you like?” Raelle asked.

“Is there anything new?” 

Raelle hesitated for a moment, before shrugging. “I don’t think so,”

“Just you, then.” She smirked, “I suppose that’s not shocking. It’s been a while. I did put in a request for _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone_ , has that come through yet?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Raelle said.

That earned a good-natured eye roll from Thirteen before she said, “Come now, is it on the cart or not?”

“Oh. Um, no.” 

“Pity. I’ll take _A Tale of Two Cities_ ,”

Raelle nodded and ducked away to the cart. She flipped through _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , ticking off the noted damages as she found them. No new irregularities to report, so she replaced it and quickly looked over the cart, pulling _A Tale of Two Cities_ out from the bottom shelf. A list of imperfections was already written within it, and she pulled it out and slipped it into the ledger for Detainee Thirteen. She made her way back over and pushed the book through the door. 

“There,” Raelle said, starting to turn away as the book was removed from the slot, but Thirteen made a noise.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean _A Tale of Two Cities_ , I’m so stupid! I was thinking of _Great Expectations_. I’m afraid I’ve read _A Tale of Two Cities_ one too many times to try to read it again. My apologies, I tend to get all of my wires crossed when it comes to Dickens,” she smiled apologetically, stepping forward, “He’s quite wordy, I tend to lose the plot half-way through and forget what I’m reading, so I mix titles easily. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble?” she asked, gaze hopeful, and Raelle felt her jaw tighten. 

Had Goldenrod not said anything, she would have thought nothing of such an innocent request, but Goldenrod _had_ said something, and something in this woman’s hopeful look was mischievous. She could sense it. 

Raelle narrowed her eyes, “If you get all of Dickens’ work confused, are you sure it’s _Great Expectations_ you want?”

“The one about Pip and Estella and Miss Havisham, yes,” she smiled wryly, “I know which one it is, I promise,”

“Okay,” Raelle said flatly, and Thirteen stepped forward and pushed the book through the slot. Raelle took it and traipsed back to the cart, changing all of the paperwork again before switching everything to reflect _Great Expectations_ as the book she was giving Thirteen. 

“Wait!”

Raelle flinched as the sound of Thirteen’s voice rang, loud and clear, across the hall, and several snickers made her face flush. She looked up to see Glory looking at her, nervous. 

“I said _Great Expectations_ , I’m so sorry. I meant _Oliver Twist_. I have such a thing for orphans, being one myself. I’d hate to be a bother but could you bring me that one instead?”

Raelle stood and slowly turned, clenching her fists at her side, to look at Thirteen through her little slot. The detainee wore a proud and mischievous smirk, head tilted up only just, in an invisible challenge, eyes still sparkling with trouble. 

Oh, two could play at that game. 

“Sure,” Raelle said tightly. She bent back down, rummaging through the books and once more undoing all of her cataloging to re-administer yet another book to Thirteen. She stood once more and slid the book, face down and with the spine facing her, through the little slot. 

Raelle watched the smirk drop, if only for a moment (but oh, what a sweet, sweet moment it was), before Thirteen recovered and raised an eyebrow, amusement somehow still dancing across her features. 

“ _Guns, Germs, Steel, and Magic_? Really?” she snorted. “Very childish,”

Raelle shrugged, “I think you just have poor taste, clearly you don’t pay much attention to Dickens. Try reading something more exciting for once. Enjoy it,” she said, shutting the book slot with finality. 

Thirteen bit her lip, her smile still somehow firmly in place, looking genuinely almost…delighted, that Raelle had caught onto her little game. “Well, I suppose I should thank you for imbuing me with such great taste, Private Collar,”

“Specialist Collar,” Raelle corrected, before she could stop herself. 

A final smirk, “Private Collar. You learn my name, I’ll call you by yours,” she said simply, before cracking open the book and sitting herself down right on the floor, effectively dismissing Raelle. 

Raelle huffed to herself and left, continuing towards the others, who had advanced very nearly to the entire other end of the hall. She ignored the hoots and hollers being called at her for having fallen for Thirteen’s stupid prank.

“What was that about?” Glory whispered, and Raelle rolled her eyes.

“Thirteen tried what Goldenrod said they would, so I shut it down,”

“Good, as you should!” Goldenrod piped up, coming up to them at the cart and placing a book back, “Sixteen-hundred is trouble, but like…the innocent kind. Compared to the rest of them, she’s not bad. The other guards can be a bit skittish around her, but over-all they say she’s very well-behaved. She likes to tease and have a bit of fun with you, especially if you’re new, but she’s at least always polite.” 

“Why is she in Red, then?” Glory asked, sounding genuinely surprised. 

“Oh, um…well, because she’s Spree, and she refuses to talk. Of all of them, they say she’s the only one who has ever been able to withstand advanced interrogation techniques. They say she once ate glass that she’d been tricked into thinking was food, and she smiled even once she realized it. Just laughed. Even kept eating. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I hear out of Interrogators in the barracks. They call her Sixteen-hundred because that’s her body count.”

Raelle felt her eyebrows shoot up. 

“She’s the Spree agent that carried out that mall attack a few years ago. It’s the only thing she’d let them see in linking during interrogations, over and over and over. I hear a few officers actually requested reassignment because they just couldn’t handle seeing it so much. Lt. Graves started calling her Sixteen-hundred because she wanted to remind everyone what they were dealing with, I guess, and most of us just sort of adopted it.”

“Shit,” Glory murmured, and Goldenrod nodded. Raelle, for her part, simply glanced back down the hall to Thirteen’s cell, and felt her palms start to sweat. 

Right. Terrorists. These were terrorists. 

For the first time, she found herself really realizing that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have y'all ever read Dickens? I know he's considered one of the greats, but I remember reading Great Expectations and there being a solid page and a half description of a staircase. So obviously I picked him to write an imitative piece for the same literature class in which I read him. Despite my general dislike of Dickens' wordiness, he has had a huge influence on my writing style. Hope I'm not as terribly wordy as him, though!
> 
> Also I don't know if any of you have ever had to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (I added the "and Magic" here because it's an AU and tbh I feel like he'd be remiss to exclude magic from a book about agriculture, colonialism, and conquest). I...don't remember a lot of it except it being incredibly dry. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed Chapter 3/meeting Scylla! She's a sass-master and we love her. If you have a moment, feed the author with a comment or kudos, otherwise, thanks for stopping by and reading! :)


	4. Red Wing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Another chapter for y'all, glad everyone enjoyed Scylla's introduction (except maybe Raelle, for the moment haha).
> 
> No important notes for this one, just the usual don't own/no beta, the usual.
> 
> Enjoy!

They never did receive news of what happened to Goldenrod’s partner, and Raelle and Glory were quietly reassigned from Kitchen to Red, nearly a week ahead of schedule and without change to the original two weeks they were supposed to be there. Nearly three weeks in Red was apparently considered a rarity, because Raelle heard whispers about it as she suited up for her first official Red Wing shift. Glory looked nervous as hell, and Raelle couldn’t say she blamed her. 

After their first time in Red with Mobile Library, Hobbs had gently, but in a way that left no room for debate, pulled them aside and informed them that while Goldenrod’s team member would be fine, Goldenrod would be teamed up with them temporarily until her partner could return to her rotation. 

Raelle had raised her eyebrows at that, but their orders were clear: they were to start a week early on their Red rotation. Glory had been pale the entire walk back to barracks, and Raelle had gently touched her shoulder and said quietly, “Hey, it’ll be okay,”

“I know it will, but it’s a lot, you know? Red’s a lot.”

“Yeah, I know. But we’ll do it, and then we’ll be back on Gray, and that’ll be a nice change, right?”

“A well-earned one, too,” Glory said seriously. 

Raelle smiled. “That’s the spirit,”

“Thanks, Raelle. I guess…I’ll see you tomorrow,”

“Yeah,”

The change to the schedule had been instantaneous: it was reflected on the page tacked to her door as Raelle arrived in her dorm and greeted her dormmate, Orion Clearwater, who was on her second stint at Cotton Mather and who held a totally different schedule to Raelle, as Clearwater was an Interrogator. 

Raelle hadn’t been able to keep herself from sighing out loud, and Orion looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “What’s up?” she asked. 

Despite not really talking, Raelle actually did appreciate Clearwater’s company. She was perceptive and kept to herself, didn’t stick her nose in Raelle’s business, and they got along because they mostly stuck to pleasantries. Still, Raelle plopped herself on her bed and decided to show her roommate the change of schedule, and Orion laughed. 

“Oh yeah, I remember my first tour of Red. They’ve all done some messed up shit and they’ll definitely tear you apart if you let them, but honestly, security is so strict there that nothing major has happened in years.”

Not that that was particularly comforting, because obviously “minor” things were still happening, and Raelle had found herself wondering, well into the night, what became of Reds who misbehaved. And what, exactly, constituted “major” things? What the hell had happened to Goldenrod’s partner? 

None of the questions were answered, though, so she turned up for duty as scheduled, right on time. She and Glory suited up, Goldenrod joining them, and just like that, they were on their way to Red again, trailing behind Granada and Thistle, and Spellman and Pyewacket. 

Thistle stopped them outside of the security check point, turning to the team and handing each one a piece of paper. 

“Keep those close. This is today’s schedule for Red. Collar, Moffet: you’ll see we do things a little differently here. Every detainee has their own schedule, and your lists will change with each new day. All assignments are random. The name of the game in Red is confusion. These are highly dangerous enemy operatives: the less of a proper schedule we keep them on, the more disoriented they are, the less likely they are to cause trouble,”

Raelle raised an eyebrow, fairly certain that that wasn’t how people worked, but she kept her mouth shut. 

“For cell inspections, detainees are cuffed around wrists and ankles and are held by either Sg. Granada or myself, for tonight. Cell inspections must be carried out by all of us, at once. Two to hold the detainee, two to sweep the room. Before any interaction with detainees, you must announce your presence with loud knocks, like you did for Mobile Library. Prisoners must say ‘Clear’: if they do not, you are not to open any part of their door, understood?”

Raelle nodded, and Glory did as well, but much too quickly. 

“Once you are given ‘Clear’, you are to perform a quick scan of the door. Only when that scan comes back clean, can you open the communication slot. Once cuffs are secured around their wrists, the cell door can be opened. For the inspections tonight, you will just follow our orders. Goldenrod will show you protocol for inspection. Understood?”

“Yes Sergeant Thistle,” Glory and Raelle said in unison. 

“Good. Once we feel you have the hang of it, we will leave you to carry out your duties. A guard will always, without exceptions, be stationed at the only two ways in or out of Red. If at any point during your rounds, you have any trouble at all, you are to seek them out. Tonight, it is Spellman and Pyewacket. Tomorrow, it will be Granada and I, and still other nights, it will be a combination of two of the three of you until Goldenrod begins her Orange rotation next week. Red is the highest-security we have, don’t forget it. Keep your schedules close, do not let your detainees see it, and be prepared for anything. Now, let’s get started.”

Raelle glanced down at her schedule as they continued onward through the security door, humming the proper seed to pass safely through it with the rest of her team for the night. 

21:00 – Onboarding/Initial Reports (Thistle-Company)  
22:00 – Knock Rotation/Door Check 3-5-13-37 (Collar)  
22:30 – 7, Cell Inspection (Thistle, Granada Assist. Collar-Moffet-Goldenrod Inspect)  
00:00 – Knock Rotation (EVENS, Thistle-Company)  
00:30 – 13, Cell Inspection (Granada, Thistle Assist. Collar-Moffet-Goldenrod Inspect)  
02:00 – Meal, 78 (Collar)  
02:30 – 5 Cell Inspection (Thistle, Granada Assist. Collar-Moffet-Goldenrod Inspect)  
03:30 – Door Check 13-37 (Collar)  
04:00 – Meal, 13 (Collar)  
04:30 – 145 Cell Inspection (Granada, Thistle Assist. Collar-Moffet-Goldenrod Inspect)  
05:30 – Knock Rotations/Door Check 145-78-91  
06:00 – Final Checks, Reports (Thistle-Company)  
07:00 – Dismissed (Thistle-Company)

God, it was going to be a long night.

\--- 

They started with Knock Rotation, of which the entire point was, apparently, to just make noise. Which seemed like a waste to Raelle, but she refrained from saying anything. Still, all eyes turned to Raelle, and Raelle realized that, indeed, she was assigned the first detainee on the Knock Rotation. Despite herself, she felt her palms sweating. She locked her jaw nevertheless and walked up to the cell door that housed Detainee Three, banging on it loudly with her open palm, unsure if she should do anything else. 

“Rise and shine, maggot!” Thistle shouted, nearly right in Raelle’s ear, inadvertently answering her unasked question. “These are terrorists, Specialists. Do not be afraid to give them a piece of your mind through the door,” she stared pointedly at Raelle before signaling for them to continue. 

Goldenrod was a little more practiced, banging on the next cell and yelling “Up and at ‘em, asshat!” which earned a sly, exasperated eye-roll from Pyewacket, who hit her own assigned door with a force that had the sound reverberating through the hall despite the supposed soundproofing. 

“Wake the fuck up!” was her preferred slogan, and they continued on, Glory the only of the six of them, besides Raelle, to say her words with little conviction. 

“It’s, uh, a bad day to be you!” she’d managed, and not loud enough for it to likely carry through the door. Raelle appreciated that Glory had tried, but failed. Glory wasn’t built to be tough. She had been trained as a Flier: they saw combat but, much like medics, were hardly ever directly involved in it. She would likely head into some sort of pilot or aerodynamics job, after her turn at Cotton Mather had ended. Perhaps they’d sent her there to toughen her up. 

Raelle could sympathize, in a way. Both of them were in a place they’d rather not be. The difference was that Raelle didn’t mind being mean to a few murderers. 

They rounded the sharp corner that showed them the other end of the hall, still guarded by the previous shift’s guard, who nodded at them as they continued down the hall, Raelle once again first, slamming on the door for Detainee Seventy-nine and shouting “Get the fuck up!” and deciding she liked that enough to use it again for her last door. 

The soldier at the end nodded at them as Pyewacket came forward to take her place, and left without a word except the seed she needed to use to open the security door behind her. Once the door shut, Pyewacket sang another seed to re-seal it, and traced her pinky finger over part of it. She turned when she was finished, folding her hands behind her back and standing stoically. 

“And now, we begin,” Thistle said, nodding back down the hall. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh shit now they're gonna be stuck in Red Wing for nearly 3 weeks, whatever could happen?! I actually have a sketch of Red Wing/Cotton Mather and also Corey Isle which I may put up at the end of this story, let me know if those drawings would be of interest to anyone. It's not exactly something one needs to see in order to understand the prison layout but it was a good reference project for me while writing this. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed, thanks for reading! ^_^


	5. Scylla Ramshorn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in two days?? Yeah! I hear you guys on the short chapters, tbh this is the first time I'm publishing such a long fic that is already completed so I had no idea how I should split the chapters up. I've revised it all and to make up for the short one that really was just establishing everything for the events of this one, figured I'd upload another one. 
> 
> Things of note in this chapter:  
> -Uff, things get a little rough for Scylla here, nothing super-graphic (and she's handled much worse during her time at Cotton Mather) but there is some violence and blood so just be aware of that.
> 
> Enjoy!

Cell Inspections were…terrifying, honestly. Detainee Seven was the first on their schedule, and while the procedure was fairly straight-forward, Raelle still felt tense, seeing Seven out of her cell, with her sneer and gaze full of hate, thick collar wrapped tightly around her neck. She cooperated fine, sticking her wrists through the door to be cuffed after they’d performed all necessary inspections, and she complied with the ankle cuffs, and even with being forcefully pressed into the wall by Thistle and Granada, and looking none too pleased about it. Raelle couldn’t say she blamed her, but she felt a bit safer despite herself. She doubted, just from how they were holding Seven and how quickly both Thistle and Granada could probably react – not to mention knock her out or put her to sleep – any of them were likely really in much danger, but it still felt ominous. 

The inspection process itself was easy, and Goldenrod walked them through it, Glory holding a clipboard to note everything they inspected, and to mark it as checked and cleared. They checked literally everything for magical alterations as well as physical: for any and all anomalies, and it made sense to Raelle why they needed an hour and a half per cell inspection despite the absolutely tiny size of the cells themselves. They couldn’t have been larger than six and a half feet in any direction, and so were a little cramped with the three of them in one, but with the thoroughness of their search, and even with an extra person, it took them almost the entire time to properly complete the inspection and then situate Detainee Seven back in her cell. 

After another round of Knock Rotation, during which Thistle also encouraged them to do a quick door check (“Ladies, it is never a bad idea during Knock Rotations, to check a door! Especially the door of your next cell inspection!”) which was exactly what they ended up doing when they had finished knocking and yelling on the doors of even-numbered detainees. 

The glowing blue-gray lines, like some kind of x-ray, showed that Thirteen (or Sixteen-hundred or whatever her stupid number was) was up and about, standing as Granada banged on the door. “Sixteen-hundred! Cell Inspection!” Granada leaned into the door but not enough to touch it, listening intently until, Raelle guessed, she heard the answering “Clear”. 

Granada pulled open the book slot, and pale hands slipped out, which Thistle promptly cuffed. 

“Step back,” Granada said authoritatively, and the hands retreated. 

Raelle couldn’t help but notice the subtle look that passed between Granada and Thistle as Thistle yanked open the door with only a moment’s hesitation, and Granada charged in. 

Thirteen didn’t fight, though based on how quickly they moved, Raelle could guess that she had been known to. Judging also by how Granada nearly immediately had her hand on Thirteen’s forehead, ready to put her to sleep, while Thistle quickly fastened shackles to her ankles, Raelle could already tell that Thirteen was considered to be dangerous. 

It almost felt…wrong, though Raelle knew that was stupid. This woman had single-handedly forced over a thousand people to jump to their deaths: she was likely capable of simple acts of violence, too. But it was just how Goldenrod had told them that Thirteen was “polite”, the best of the bunch, that made it all the more perturbing that they seemed to be extra quick and not particularly gentle getting Thirteen out of her cell, despite compliantly allowing them to with no issue. With her face pressed into the wall right outside of her cell, her blue eyes didn’t quite have the hypnotic feel they had last time.

That was, until a smile spread across her features as she spotted Raelle.

“Private Collar, my, what a pleasure this is, I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon. You’ll excuse the appearance, I’m afraid I have trouble keeping this one off of me,” she said, her entire demeanor suddenly playful. 

Not that Raelle had seen what her demeanor had been before, but she chose to ignore Thirteen’s greeting, instead heading into her cell. 

“Shut up, maggot,” Granada said sharply, pushing harder onto the back of her head. 

Thirteen winced and for just a split second, Raelle saw it: hatred. It was cold, and dark. The type of look that a murderer would wear. A murderer asking for someone to give them a reason. 

But as quickly as the look came, it vanished, and was replaced by an airy laugh. 

“My face can only go so far into concrete, Sergeant,”

“If you don’t shut up I won’t hesitate to break it,”

“Very barbaric, are you sure you shouldn’t be in there instead of me?”

Granada made good on her promise, pulling Thirteen’s head back by her hair and shoving her back against the wall. 

Raelle flinched but quickly looked away. Even from the corner of her eye, though, she could see that some part of Thirteen was dripping blood. 

“Not laughing now, are you?” Granada hissed, and to maybe everyone’s surprise…Thirteen did laugh. The sound sent a shiver down Raelle’s spine. 

But, perhaps wisely, Thirteen didn’t say anything else. Raelle could feel Thirteen’s steady gaze on her throughout the entire inspection, and it was just as unnerving as it had been the first time she’d seen that unwavering look. Did the woman even blink? 

They got on with their search while Thirteen – oddly still excepting her eyes, which Raelle could feel all over her – just…stared. Raelle pointedly ignored both those eyes and the book, placed neatly on Thirteen’s bed, which was also pristinely made and was thus torn apart for their inspection. 

“Have you ever actually read _Guns, Germs, Steel and Magic_ , Private Collar?” Thirteen finally found her voice again.

“I thought I told you to shut up, Sixteen-hundred,” Granada sneered. 

“I’m curious,” Thirteen shot back, and before things could escalate again, Raelle cut in. 

“I read it in high school. Most boring book I’ve ever read in my entire life,” she said truthfully, marking a check next to “bed” when Glory sent her a thumbs up.

“It is a bit dry, yes,” Thirteen said, amused, “Very interesting choice, though. If you think boredom is a punishment, you can’t have been here very long. And you definitely haven’t been. I would have remembered a beautiful face like yours,”

Raelle felt her ears burn but did her best to not let it show just how weird it was that a known mass-murdering terrorist was flirting with her. And so blatantly, at that.

“Especially as all I’ve had to look at are all these ugly mugs,”

“Do you want me to slam your face into the wall again?” Granada asked sharply. 

“Oh, would you? It’s the only way I feel anything anymore,” Thirteen said sarcastically, and Raelle caught a snort before it could escape her.

Thistle leaned in threateningly, “Remember who is in control here, Sixteen-hundred.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she retorted darkly. “I can taste the reminder in my mouth, thanks.”

Raelle did spare Thirteen a glance, then, and sure enough, it seemed like there was a small gash on her forehead, which dripped blood down her nose, over her lips and down past her chin, where it had started dripping on her already red uniform. She smiled at Raelle and there was blood on her teeth, and Raelle immediately looked away. 

What a threatening picture. 

\---

They finished the inspection and Granada and Thistle were quick to situate Thirteen back in her cell, though again, Thirteen seemed all too compliant, reaching her hands through the open book slot so they could take the handcuffs off of her. She leaned down, enough so that Raelle could see her piercing gaze as they locked eyes, and she saw in the expression of those eyes, a smile. 

“It was lovely to see you again, Private Collar,” she said.

“Specialist,” Raelle muttered under her breath, and if she didn’t know any better, she would think that the smile widened, but she couldn’t really tell because they had the cuffs off and were slamming the slot shut. 

“Well, ladies, nice work,” Thistle congratulated them, once they re-fortified Thirteen’s cell. “Collar,”

Raelle looked up. Thistle nodded sternly at her, “She’s a smooth talker. Good at making people believe she won’t hurt them. Good at making us look bad for administering punishment, but if you knew the half of the shit Sixteen-hundred has pulled…well. Just…be careful.”

Raelle nodded, “Yeah, I will,”

**\---**

Raelle wasn’t a massive fan of meal time, as she found out pretty quickly that mostly, it was the same security measures they’d been using all night, plus she had to watch detainees eat. Without silverware. Without utensils of any kind, except their hands. Detainee Seventy-eight was definitely unpleasant to watch. He shoveled down food with his whole hand and maintained eye contact with her the whole time, which was somehow even worse than Thirteen’s unnerving stare. His eyes were half-wild and he looked like he took immense pleasure in knowing he was making her very uncomfortable, but there was nothing she could do: mealtime had to be monitored because apparently, on more than one occasion, detainees had been caught trying to make weapons out of foam trays. One had nearly succeeded, or so she’d been told. Since then, mealtimes were supervised. Detainees who took longer than their designated time to eat were dealt a swift round of mace, according to Thistle, and when they inevitably dropped their trays, trays were summoned, food and all, by seed. 

Thankfully, Seventy-eight didn’t seem all that keen to deal with that, so despite the unpleasant experience of watching him stuff his face, he did as he was supposed to by finishing his food and then returning the tray with no fuss except for a wide, toothy grin that showed off half of the dinner he’d just eaten. 

Raelle’d allowed her lip to curl in disgust, shutting the window as soon as she had the tray on her side of the door, and then shutting the meal slot right after doing her checks on the tray. 

Thirteen, thankfully, was a little more graceful. Raelle couldn’t say she was looking forward to having to watch the woman eat, but it was what it was, and she sent Glory a grimace as her partner headed over to her own assigned detainee for mealtime.

Raelle banged on the door, announcing “Thirteen! Mealtime!” and getting the muffled “Clear!” not a moment later. Raelle popped open the window cover, checking to make sure Thirteen was where she needed to be. 

“Ah, Private Collar. Lovely to see you again. And so soon!” and she had the audacity to sound genuinely pleased by that fact. “It’s been very nearly hours since I last saw you, this is a surprise!”

“You know, if you think that calling me Private Collar is going to grind me down with annoyance, you should know that if the Army couldn’t break me with it, you certainly won’t be able to,” she sent her a fake smile and pushed the meal tray through the appropriate slot. “Just so you don’t waste your time waiting for me to bite on that little baited hook you’re trying to set up,”

A smirk, “I have nothing but time to waste, Private Collar. I’m sure I’ll wear you down. I always do,” a spark of mischief ignited in her gaze before she leaned forward and took her meal, then backed away from the door and sat herself, cross-legged, on her bed. 

“Cocky,” Raelle couldn’t help herself, and Thirteen smirked as she started eating, at least having the decency to not use her hand as an actual shovel. 

“I admit I can get a bit lost in my own hubris, at times,”

“They warn us about that, you know,” Raelle said.

“About my hubris? My, my reputation precedes me,” Thirteen laughed, and Raelle rolled her eyes. 

“No, not about your hubris. About your tactics. Familiarity, names. That sort of thing.”

“Names are the first step to humanizing an ‘other’, so I suppose it’s a good strategy, to try to tell you not to learn ours. But truthfully, Private Collar, I just get bored remembering everyone’s title and name. It’s much easier to miss-rank everyone and tempt the fates. Keeps things interesting,” she winked. 

“‘Interesting’ is what gave you that lovely gash,”

Thirteen reached up and touched it, as though she’d forgotten it was there. The wound itself looked like it had stopped bleeding, and it was clear that she’d used the water from her sink to wash the blood away, but there were still smudges: remnants of crimson painted on her face. Which made sense, as she didn’t have a mirror to look into.

“Well, you’ve got to break a few eggs, sometimes,” she replied with a sheepish shrug. 

“Seems like a stupid strategy,”

“You would think, but it’s worked so far,”

“Has it?” Raelle asked flatly. 

That spark of mischief was back as Thirteen ate another bite of her meal. “It hasn’t worked on you, yet. But you’ll get there. Names are simply the first step. You don’t even have to call me by my real one: I prefer my nickname, and I know that so many others here do, too. I know it’s on all of my files and it suits me better than Thirteen, anyway.”

“What, Sixteen-hundred?”

A quick nod. “Exactly,”

Raelle snorted, “Okay, cool. Now I know to never call you that,”

“You can call me Scylla instead, if you prefer,”

“And why would I call you that?”

“It’s my name.”

That, to Raelle, almost felt like a slap in the face. Of course Thirteen would do that. Slip her name into conversation, knowing there was no way it could be unheard. 

“Is it?” Raelle opted to play dumb, which got her a little uptick of Thirteen’s lips. 

“It is, for what it’s worth. Scylla Ramshorn.”

“I think I’ll call you Thirteen.”

Thirteen shrugged. “Then I’ll call you Private Collar,”

“You were doing that anyway,”

This time, the smile was genuine, amusement playing across her expression as she ate some more. “So I was. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Private Collar,” she held up her meal pointedly.

“Yeah, fine,” Raelle muttered, fidgeting slightly and glad that Thirteen couldn’t see. She shifted her weight on her feet as Thirteen turned her full attention to her meal, eating, again, in a way that was far better to witness than Seventy-eight, but somehow just as awkward. 

Raelle found herself looking away, briefly checking on Glory and Goldenrod, not far from her, also administering mealtime to their own assigned detainees. 

She glanced back to Thirteen, and then back and forth, until mealtime was over and Thirteen returned her tray. She gave Raelle one last smile and said, quietly, “I hope I get to see you again, Private Collar. Have a good afternoon.” That damn amusement shown bright on Thirteen’s features, which irked Raelle.

She nodded curtly nonetheless, accepting the tray through the slot and closing it. She didn’t bother answering, nor correcting Thirteen’s terrible sense of time, instead shutting the window. 

By the time their shift was over, Raelle was exhausted, she had a splitting headache from the incessant fluorescent lights, and from the fact that she wasn’t used to pulling ten-hour overnighters. The only good thing about it was that she was so tired when she arrived to her room that she collapsed on her bed and was out almost immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, Sassy Scylla is so fun to write but also super-challenging, I don't know how she does it. Snuck her name right in there, though. Sneaky sneaky. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed the longer-form chapter! :)


	6. Innocent People

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Thank you for continuing to read and comment, it makes my day! ^_^ 
> 
> Things to know for this chapter:  
> -I purposefully bastardized "Her bark is worse than her bite" in this because let's be real, Scylla's not typically physically confrontational in-canon (much as we are waiting for her to just go HAM on someone) and she doesn't issue empty threats, like "bark worse than her bite" would imply, so in this case it worked better to mess with the expression a little.  
> -Honestly I think that's it...
> 
> Enjoy!

Red Wing was definitely the one with the oddest hours. Mealtimes were not consistent, and Raelle honesty hesitated to call anything on their rotation something even resembling a “schedule”, which, she supposed, was why they had their own printed versions every night. Security door guard duty was by far the worst part of it all: standing for hours on end and only speaking occasionally with the others as they performed their duties was…terrible. Minutes had never ticked by so slowly in her entire life, and while Raelle couldn’t say she was a fan of any specific aspect of Red Wing, she did prefer being allowed to at least walk up and down the halls. That always came with its own challenges, though, and cell inspections were only part of it. 

Thirteen, honestly, was the thing she dreaded most about anything that wasn’t security door guard duty. The enigmatic detainee had taken a liking to Raelle in a way that she really didn’t appear to have with anyone else, which was unnerving to say the least, but at least Thirteen did try to play it off by being polite to everyone except Granada. 

And, it turned out, Thirteen actually did seem have a good rapport with most of the other guards, as evidenced by their next week, where Goldenrod, Thistle, Granada, Spellman, and Pyewacket all rotated to other assignments and Raelle was forced to learn even more names. Despite the name badges, Raelle opted to just start using rank: it was easier.

The schedules were always different, though she did notice that any direct interactions with prisoners that involved them leaving their cells were strictly handled by her superiors, which was just as well. Some of the people in Red weren’t as…charming, as Thirteen, and certainly not as stoically quiet as Three. Thirty-six, the rowdy prisoner from Orange, did get transferred into Red, just as Raelle suspected he would be, and he was a handful any time they had to interact with him: fighting to the point that they basically just had to mace him any time they needed to open his cell. More often than not, they had to put him to sleep to transfer him anywhere. 

Detainees in Red were sometimes scheduled for interrogations, which involved a handoff at one of the entrances. Raelle witnessed more than one of such transfers, the detainees bent forward in prisoner’s pose, blind-folded or black-bagged, and with their ears covered. Recreation time was also a bit random, and only assigned during normal walk-throughs, because taking detainees to recreation meant they were down two guards. The detainee’s vacated cell was always quickly swept, a mini-inspection, while the assigned prisoner was out.

Knock rotations were randomly scheduled, as were door and cell inspections, and it got to the point that Raelle didn’t even try to keep track of it. By the middle of her second week, she considered herself adjusted to the oddness of Red.

The only thing that really still threw her off…was Detainee Thirteen. The first thing that threw her off was the contrast between how her superiors handled Thirteen. Granada and Thistle had handled her with suspicion and aggression, but the sergeants that were there to conduct the next inspection of her cell were decidedly more relaxed. 

“Sixteen-hundred!” one called, as she banged on the door. “Cell Inspection!”

Neither seemed particularly wary or bothered as they opened the door after slapping the cuffs on the offered wrists, neither exchanging an odd look and indeed, both seemed pretty chill as they fastened the shackles and the cuffs together and walked her calmly out of the cell. 

“Ah, Private Collar! Specialist Moffet!” Thirteen greeted them amicably when she saw them. 

“Making friends, Sixteen-hundred?” one of the Sergeants asked dryly, and Thirteen shrugged as they pushed her into position against the wall.

“You know me, Redmayne, I try my best,”

“That you do,” Redmayne said, deadpan.

Despite holding Thirteen in much the same way that Granada and Thistle had, neither sergeant seemed worried about Thirteen nor her talkative behavior overall, and Raelle noted that they didn’t look particularly perturbed, which was…concerning in itself. Once inspection was finished and Thirteen safely returned to her cell, Redmayne mentioned something to Raelle about Thirteen’s bite being worse than her bark. 

“She’ll talk your ear off and she’s very charming, which is why we call her Sixteen-hundred, you know? Otherwise it’d be really easy to forget what she’s done. But we remember. Other than that though, she never has really caused much trouble, at least not here in Terminer. And she doesn’t, unless you give her reason to. A little compassion can go a long way here. We’ve been trying to get on her good side for a while, hoping we can get her to cooperate. But honestly, we think she just likes the company, so we let her talk. It’s harmless. Besides,” she shrugged, “punishment doesn’t seem to work with Sixteen-hundred, so we’ve been trying to take a different approach. So far, it’s been working out fine. She’s not broken anyone’s nose in a while,” she said it so casually, as though it had been a thing that happened with some frequency, which Raelle felt warranted more alarm than it was given.

Thirteen told her something similar at mealtime, when Raelle, after nearly a week of not being assigned Thirteen for said mealtime, got her once again. 

“Redmayne and Ravensgate have been here the longest. They’re usually in interrogation but we never really crossed paths there. They don’t particularly like me, but they’re nice enough, so I’m happy to return the favor. Makes all of our lives a little easier,” Thirteen smiled good-naturedly as she once again took her meal and sat on her bed, facing Raelle through the tiny window. “After all, what damage could I possibly do?” she flicked the collar around her neck.

Raelle didn’t say anything, but that didn’t stop Thirteen from continuing. “They’re perhaps the nicest. A bit of respect goes a long way, you see? But Granada and Thistle definitely dislike me the most, despite my polite disposition.” Thirteen shrugged and rolled her eyes, “But, what’s a girl to do?”

Another smile, and she said, “I saw you watching them. Very chill, compared to last week, no?”

“They call you Sixteen-hundred,” Raelle said, after a beat. 

Thirteen nodded, “They all do,”

“You know why, right?”

An eye-roll was what greeted her question. “I told you, that’s my nickname.”

“They call you that to remember what you are and why you’re here. They call you that to remember to treat you like the criminal you are.”

“Good.”

Raelle blinked, surprised at that reaction. “You think it’s good that they call you by the number of civilians that you killed?”

“I think it’s important to remember who your enemy is,” Thirteen said simply, “and if calling them by the number of people they’ve murdered helps with that, then so be it. What would your number be, Private Collar?”

Raelle snapped her mouth shut, startled and then offended. She clenched her jaw, “That’s none of your business,”

“But you do have a number. A body count. We all do. That’s war, beautiful,” Scylla said it as though it were a plain fact, accompanied by a little half-shrug. 

Raelle worked her jaw, biting back half-retorts as they formed in her mind. She didn’t know why she’d bothered engaging: she knew better. Her orders were strictly not to engage with prisoners, but Thirteen always instigated something. 

No more. Raelle clamped her jaw shut and looked away, checking in again briefly with Glory and the other two sergeants doing a few door inspections. She looked back into the cell but purposefully did not allow herself to look at Thirteen, instead focusing around her or on the tray in her hands. 

\---

“I don’t have a number,” Raelle hadn’t meant to say it. Not really. She wasn’t supposed to engage. She’d resolved to not speak with Thirteen any longer. She knew what Thirteen was trying to do, after all: they’d been warned about talkers, trying to rope them into debates, trying to sway them. Because of that, they weren’t supposed to speak to detainees and she certainly wasn’t supposed to be feeding into whatever bullshit Thirteen was trying to play. 

But it nagged at her. It nagged at her that this…terrorist, assumed Raelle’d killed people. She knew it was feasible…she was in the military, after all. But she was a healer. Taking lives didn’t come naturally, it never had. Her only body count had been in defense of her country, in defense of herself, and it felt wrong to count those deaths. Those deaths had prevented the deaths of hundreds, thousands, or even millions, more. The Spree agents in those trucks at City Drop. The civilians as collateral damage. Private Smythe. A few more Spree agents on a few recon missions during War College. 

Necessary sacrifice, as they'd been told. Over and over. The only blood Raelle really had on her hands was the blood of the people she couldn’t heal. One of the boy at her first Beltane who’d jumped off a roof. One of her neighbors whose cancer had spread too quickly for her to keep up with. The deaths of the innocent, of the ones who hadn’t done anything…of those who weren’t fighters in war but only in life, just trying to make it to the next day. Those deaths weighed heavily on her, but they hadn’t died by her hands, so even if she wanted, and did, blame herself for being unable to save them…their deaths weren’t her fault. No one’s direct death had been her fault. Not with the same malicious intent with which Thirteen had killed. 

And Raelle couldn’t just let it go. Thirteen hadn’t even said anything, just her usual pleasant greeting as she accepted her meal from Raelle the second time that week and took her usual position on her bed.

It’d slipped out without Raelle’s permission.

Thirteen snorted. “Sure beautiful, tell yourself that. Whatever helps you sleep at night,”

“Compared to yours-”

“Compared to mine, everyone’s is fairly small, excepting the highest military officer, of course. I’d need a few lifetimes, like Alder's had, to truly even fathom hitting such numbers,” Thirteen raised a challenging eyebrow, “And so would you. I have no doubt your number is small, Private Collar. You say you’re a Specialist? Likely just graduated War College, no?”

Raelle clenched her jaw but said nothing, but Thirteen’s knowing smirk told Raelle that Thirteen knew she was right. 

Thirteen nodded to herself, “So you’re still new. Haven’t cut your teeth yet. But I hear they’ve been sending you guys in earlier and earlier. Some cadets at City Drop got sent on a real mission not too long ago. Few years back. Some basic math and I’d dare say you could have been one of them,” Thirteen eyed her appreciatively. 

Raelle stared and said nothing, trying to keep her face neutral. She didn’t need this detainee to know she’d hit the nail on the head, but more than that, it was…perturbing, that this Spree terrorist knew the structure of the military so well.

Unless…

“You were military?” the thought, unbidden, was accidentally spoken aloud, and Thirteen tilted her head. 

“Conscription is mandatory, beautiful. Or have you forgotten?” a half-smile. “Yes, I was in the military. For two years, actually. Until my cover was blown. Spent a little while being-” she threw up some air quotes “-‘interrogated’, didn’t budge so they sent me here for ‘advanced interrogation’” and again, the air quotes, “and the rest, as they say, is history. Didn’t really get the chance in Basic to take any innocent lives, but unlike you, my City Drop was rather uneventful,” that careful and calculated smirk, “So if I’m right, and I suspect I am, then you’ve killed before. How many people was that? I never did find out, but I hear at least a few were civilians.” Thirteen said. 

Raelle grit her teeth, “It hardly counts-”

“Why not? Because some of them were terrorists? So you get to subtract that from the amount of people you are responsible for killing?” Thirteen raised her eyebrows, incredulous, “So because it was a bunch of terrorists, that negates everyone else who died with them? It doesn’t work like that, beautiful. Life is life, and it all has value. Otherwise, its loss wouldn’t be so stirring. So…traumatic,” Thirteen tilted her head, “The only difference between you and I is who we’ve killed, and how willing we are to admit it,”

Raelle bit her lip. She knew that wasn’t true. It was war: sacrifice was necessary. Terrorist lives didn’t count because they were terrorists: if not stopped, they would kill en masse. The one sat before her, pleasantly eating her dinner and amicably talking about her body count, was an example. 

Even still, part of Raelle didn’t buy that. Part of her knew Thirteen was right, if only in the sense that life was life, and it all had value, no matter how much of a scumbag the person might be. Raelle’d leapt into action, on more than one occasion, to save an enemy. Because they had information: about Spree or about whatever organization they were working for. Because justice wasn’t served with death. Because it was the right thing to do. At the end of the day, if someone had done terrible things, they deserved punishment for it. But the thought still, of killing them…of looking them in the eyes while she took their life…shook her to her core. 

She’d seen it happen. She’d seen how the light was snuffed out, the fire, the thing that made someone…be. The thought of taking that from someone made her stomach churn, and the thought of taking that from sixteen-hundred people…made her physically sick. 

She forced down the bile as she quietly whispered, “You really just up and killed sixteen-hundred people,” as though realizing it for the first time. Which, she supposed that in a way, she was. It was…hard, really, to fathom loss of life on such a large scale. To truly understand it. It wasn’t as though she’d somehow thought it couldn’t be true, but Thirteen looked like such a small young woman: amicable, bubbly. Yet she was a cold-blooded mass-murderer. 

Thirteen stopped eating, looking at Raelle curiously, as though seeing her for the first time. It would have almost been hilarious, were it under any other circumstances: they’d been seeing each other on and off for nearly two whole weeks, but it was the first time Raelle really started to understand what killing sixteen-hundred people meant. 

To her surprise, Thirteen sighed, putting her foam food tray to the side and crossed her legs. She leaned forward and put an elbow to her knee, settling her chin in her palm and looking at Raelle with…pity, it looked like. But the more she watched it, the more it morphed. No, it wasn’t pity…it was contemplation. Reflection. She looked away as she whispered, “I did.”

Raelle felt a shiver run down her spine. “See, then. That’s where we’re different. I don’t kill innocent people,”

“Don’t you?”

Raelle thought she would react to that. Bristle. Perhaps be annoyed. But instead, it felt like cold water was being spilled down her back, and she didn’t like it. 

No, she didn’t kill innocent people. Not unless she was ordered to. Not unless it was for the greater good. And that mattered.

It had to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Raelle, she knows what she knows but the military has worked so hard to make it so that she doesn't know that she knows, you know? Gotta love that indoctrination: even being aware of it, it's easy to not realize just how much it can affect us...
> 
> Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this part!


	7. Blackroot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter for you all! Thank you for continuing to read and comment and kudos and enjoy, it's nice to know people like the fic! :) 
> 
> Things of note in this chapter:  
> -I know that the mysterious illness (which I have herein decided to call "Blackroot") in S1 that affected Khalida was manufactured by Camarilla, but as they don't exist in this fic, we're gonna go with it's the military messing with natural balances. It doesn't play a huge part in this fic over all (nor the next one) but Scylla's trying to get inside Raelle's head, so she's gonna use everything in her arsenal. 
> 
> That's it! The rest is just the usual: no beta, characters aren't mine, etc. (phew, can you tell I got my start on ff.net??)
> 
> Enjoy!

“We don’t target civilians,” Raelle found herself saying, at the next mealtime, two days after her last chat with Thirteen. It was really only mealtimes where she had enough privacy to speak with Thirteen, not that Thirteen seemed to particularly mind chatting with others around. Just…never about such serious topics. Raelle knew if she was caught speaking as she was to Thirteen, she’d be reprimanded, but something niggled at her. She couldn’t let a terrorist get an ideological upper hand. She just couldn’t. 

Because truth be told, Raelle had always found the message of the Spree to be…accurate. They had a point: Raelle was doomed to…bound to, the same institution that had caused her mother’s death. She didn’t have a choice in the matter, and she’d honestly never thought much on alternatives to the Army, because doing so had never been an option. Her fate had been sealed the moment she was born.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about not serving. When her mother started being deployed for long stints, Raelle started to wonder if the military really was all she could hope for in her life: a life where she would be absent from her own child, and her partner. 

Still, while her home life hadn’t exactly been ideal, it had been enough, when her mother was alive. 

In many ways, having only one direction in her life…had been a relief. But the lack of true freedom…the lack of autonomy, of the right to decide if she wanted to go fight other people’s wars…it was a problem. It had never sat right with her, and so when she’d first heard the Spree’s demands, she’d found them pretty reasonable. 

It was the methods, where they lost her. Killing civilians was…too much. And Raelle hated to admit it, but it wasn’t even the fact that they killed civilians that bothered her. She wasn’t under any illusions: civilians were often collateral damage in battle. What bothered her about Spree’s methods was that they purposefully _targeted_ civilians. 

She saw their twisted logic in it, but at the end of the day, Spree were simply wrong: civilians hadn’t asked them to serve. Civilians benefited from the system, but civilians weren’t forcing them. Not directly. Their ancestors were responsible, partly, but that wasn’t their fault. It just seemed…extreme. It seemed extreme to punish those of the present for the sins of their forefathers. It seemed unnecessary. It seemed like a waste, and that was where Raelle cut ties with the ideology. 

Thirteen raised her eyebrow as she stood, waiting for her meal to be fully pushed through the door. Raelle didn’t do it though, struck by that sudden thought. The military didn’t target civilians: Spree did. Military killed people and let witches die for others, but their purpose was to protect civilians, not kill them.

“Maybe _you_ don’t, Private Collar. But you’ve been forced into an institution that has, that does, and that will continue to in order to pursue a goal, no matter what the collateral damage. Civilians included. And it’ll be their blood on your hands, no matter the circumstances under which it gets there. And the very civilians you serve will use that as an excuse for your enslavement: too dangerous to be anywhere other than the military. Can't you see? You’ve been forced into fighting for people who don’t care about you, and who will be happy to see you dead. They’ll see you off to fight their wars and they’ll tell you it’s for the greater good. That you mean something. But you don’t. You’re a cog in their machine. They’ll chew you up and spit you out when you’re no good to them anymore. Just like they do with every. Single. Witch. They force to do their dirty work. So suit up, soldier,” Thirteen clicked her heels together and saluted, “Because the Army will send you out into the world, out to the front lines, and once you’re there, you’re the enemy. You’re the invader. You’re the terrorist. And all you’ll get to show for it is a few pieces of metal on your uniform sash, and maybe your body intact, even if your mind isn’t.” Sixteen-hundred flashed her teeth in a contemptuous snarl, “Open your eyes, Specialist Collar. They don’t give a single fuck about you.”

Raelle stared, taken aback. There was a bitter sneer on Thirteen’s features, barely contained rage bubbling below the surface. The most Raelle had really ever seen out of her. 

Raelle bit her lip, but couldn’t stop herself from muttering, “Like Spree’s any different?”

“At least with them, I had the choice. Spree gave me a place to unleash all of the anger I had at the system. A way to direct it. And an organization that accepted me for just who I was. They welcomed me with open arms and never once forced my loyalty.”

Raelle pursed her lips, “And would they welcome you back after this?”

“Would the military?” Thirteen shot back, and Raelle didn’t bother responding, because they both knew the answer.

Raelle thought on it a moment later, before remembering it was mealtime and pushing the tray in. 

“Keep it,” Thirteen said bitterly, turning away and folding her arms, “I’m not really hungry anymore,”

Raelle spent the entire mealtime looking at Thirteen’s back, Thirteen facing the wall, refusing to engage. 

And maybe, Raelle realized, should see that as a victory. So she did, pulling the tray back and closing the slot.

\---

Despite the fact that both Raelle and Glory had been pulled into Red Wing a week early for Mobile Library, it was only in the middle of her third week that they actually performed another one, which honestly made Raelle want to roll her eyes because really, at that rate, saying Red Wing had a “schedule” was simply untrue. If it truly did go around every day like they’d been told in Orientation, then it clearly was during some other shift. 

Much like that time, no one seemed to really actually want a book, which seemed a little off to Raelle simply because, well, what else did they have to do with their time? There were no windows to stare out of, no feasible way to practice any kind of magic (without getting caught). Honestly, there hardly even seemed to be time to sleep, if the rotation schedules for the other shifts were anything like the ones she’d been receiving. What the hell did the detainees do all day, if they didn’t have a damn thing to read? 

Thirteen, of course, was an exception. 

After the quiet “Clear”, it was actually Glory who opened the window. 

“Specialist Moffet, good to see you,” Raelle heard Thirteen’s voice as Raelle banged on the next door, Seventy-eight. 

Seventy-eight didn’t want anything, pointedly holding up the book he already had (and, Raelle saw in the ledger, the book he’d had for nearly three weeks). 

She reminded him of protocol and he blew a raspberry, so she rolled her eyes and walked away, back to the cart to mark down that Seventy-eight still had his book and had been reminded of the one-month limit. 

“Private Collar,” Thirteen called out, and Raelle sighed, but looked up nonetheless. She pointedly ignored the blue eyes staring at her, focusing instead on Glory, who was back at the cart, returning a book. Raelle peeked at it despite herself: 1984. 

Huh. She was a little surprised that one was allowed in the military-approved library…

Raelle raised an eyebrow curiously at the title, glancing up despite herself. 

She caught, despite the distance between them, that distinctive smirk on Thirteen’s face. 

“Specialist Moffet, if you may be so kind as to let Specialist Collar choose a book for me? I’ve found she has excellent taste,”

Glory, who had been in the middle of filling out her required paperwork, glanced up at Raelle and raised an eyebrow. 

Raelle nodded, answering the unasked question painted across Glory’s features. 

Glory turned to face Thirteen, “If Specialist Collar is willing to, I’m happy to let her choose,”

That smirk only got bigger, but genuine delight shone in those sharp blue eyes. 

Raelle held her gaze for only a moment before bending down and looking over the cart, unsure what to pick. She could do something boring, but most of the titles didn’t seem like they would be as dry as her last pick, so she finally just chose a random title and straightened. She handed it to Glory, who said nothing but raised her eyebrow once more before continuing on her paperwork. 

“Take it you finished _Guns, Germs, Steel and Magic_?” Raelle called out. 

“I did. I finished it a while ago, actually. Believe it or not, that’s actually my fourth time reading that book,”

“You must be very bored,” Raelle muttered, and Glory snickered. 

“She don’t do anything but read,” shouted one of the detainees. 

“Shut up Silverman,”

“You shut up, Ramshorn,”

Raelle glanced up in time to see Thirteen roll her eyes. 

“At least I can read, unlike some dumbasses in here.” Which earned a round of laughs from other prisoners, who quickly joined in on ribbing whoever the hell “Silverman” was. 

Raelle shook her head to herself as Glory sighed. 

“A delightful time in Red, as always,” she muttered, handing the book to Raelle.

“Few more days and we’re back on Gray,”

“Few more days,” Glory said wistfully.

Raelle smiled reassuringly at her before stepping up to Thirteen’s cell door. 

“Private Collar, another great selection for me, I assume?” Thirteen’s amusement was practically palpable, “I have to say, _Guns, Germs, Steel and Magic_ was an…interesting choice. Conquest due to geographical luck. Funny how he entirely neglects to mention witches until after The Salem Accords though, no?”

“You know, I never did get that far in the book,” Raelle said dryly. That wasn’t entirely true: the book had been required reading, so of course, Raelle had half-assed paying attention to the movie. 

“Pity. One of the biggest critiques of that book is his downplay in the use of magic in agrarian societies. He just completely chooses to ignore the devastating effects magic can have on an environment around it, if not properly handled. Doesn’t even see the irony in ignoring the displacement of thousands of civilians – whom I know you care so much about – for the sake of fighting their wars for them. Sort of like the military. How is research going into that Blackroot disease, by the way?”

Raelle froze. Blackroot had taken the lives of more than one of her class from War College. She’d seen its devastating effects only twice: once on Khalida, and once, through Lt. Quartermaine’s mental connection to a mission in the wilds of Siberia. An entire unit had been infected and ultimately died while the fixers around them tried to heal them. Nearly the same thing had happened to Khalida, when Raelle had tried to heal her, too. But…ultimately, it had worked. It had worked, but Raelle hadn’t gotten the debilitating disease, and sometimes, she wondered if she was just…carrying it. Walking around. 

A ticking time bomb. 

But her brush with Blackroot had been before even City Drop. Largely, it was an ailment that was still rare, if devastating, and besides Khalida, it had really yet to land at their feet, on their shores in the Motherland. 

That didn’t make it any less concerning, but she knew from talks with Adil (and from Abigail trying to work through her own ideologies), that the Tarim firmly believed it was caused by the environmental havoc wrought by the storms used in military battle. 

And the storms had their own consequences…

Raelle felt her stomach churn and her gaze harden into a glare, focused on the book in her hands. 

“Oh, I struck a nerve,” she looked up to see Thirteen looking at her curiously, the amusement seemingly gone, replaced only with that unnerving look that, to Raelle, seemed like Thirteen was trying to read her damn mind. 

Raelle clenched her jaw, and, without a word, turned on her heel, going back to the cart and handing the book back to Glory. 

“Thirteen elected not to have a book today,” she said, loud enough that her voice rang, and several detainees, who had apparently stopped jeering and started listening, hollered. 

“Ha! Fuck you, Ramshorn!” someone hooted. 

Glory stared at Raelle but accepted the book back cautiously, casting a glance over her shoulder. Raelle looked briefly, too, only to see Thirteen with her head tilted, a contemplative look on her face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I, like Raelle, also had to read Guns, Germs, and Steel (it would have been better if it involved magic) in high school. I'm sure it's a very important book in it's academic field, but it was very dry for a high schooler to read, and they did, in fact, make a film of it so I watched that instead...no one tell my high school English teacher. 
> 
> Also, Scylla's line about how once soldiers are sent the front lines, they're basically the invaders, is probably one of my favorites in this fic.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading! :)


	8. Chains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Phew, we're chugging right along, nearly half-way there! This chapter is a shorter one but hopefully still enjoyable! Thank you again to everyone enjoying the story and commenting/kudos-ing/reading etc. I say it a lot but it's because it always makes my day, so. :) 
> 
> Things of note in this chapter:  
> -Um honestly nothing? It was fun to write! 
> 
> Mistakes are my own, MFS is not my own, etc.
> 
> Enjoy!

“What do you know about what the military does?”

Thirteen looked up from where she’d had her attention focused on her tray, looking surprised. “I’m…sorry?”

“What do you know about what the military does?”

Thirteen rolled her eyes, “Very helpful,”

“Last mobile library. You mentioned the military fucking with balances. Blackroot. How do you know about that?”

Thirteen stared, as though she wasn’t sure if she believed Raelle was asking her that question, but well. She was. 

She was, because it had been bothering her for days. It nagged at her. It annoyed her. Because yes, people knew of the attacks the military was capable of: that was a given. And witches would know some of it. But only military witches would know the extent of the size of the storms they could create: the destruction that could be wrought. 

And only Fort Salem had information on Blackroot. That was something they were keen on not letting get out to the general public: on keeping under wraps, trying to work towards fixing it before it got out of hand. Only the top officials – if Raelle had to guess – even knew about Blackroot, and Raelle only knew that from the interrogation she got after it reached Alder that she’d healed Khalida. That interrogation had been hours on end, everyone asking her constantly how she’d done it (she didn’t know, she didn’t know! It still haunted her that she hadn’t taken on even a shred of the illness), what had she done, could she replicate it? There were too many questions and the President, the Commander in Chief, had been waiting on the phone to be briefed about the whole incident. 

It was clearly top-level stuff, which Raelle had accidentally been dragged into because Abigail had become involved with Khalida’s brother. 

“How do you know?!” she asked again. Hissed, really, trying to keep her voice low so as to not call attention to the others that she was talking to a detainee, but also…that she was livid. And more than a little worried…if Spree knew about Blackroot, they could try to harness it. They said they didn’t target witches, but recent attacks had started to seem like maybe…they did. That, or they weren’t the only terrorist organization on the block, and Raelle wasn’t sure which was worse. 

“Secrets…secrets can’t be kept at Fort Salem. Word gets around fast when a member of the Tarim shows up with his sick sister. I was Necro. I heard all about it. Whispers of the dead and that,”

“How-”

“All energies are connected, Private Collar, that’s the first thing they teach you in Basic. It’s entirely possible to latch onto a vibration of death and sense where else it’s been,” Thirteen raised a challenging eyebrow. “Of course that wasn’t easy, nor was it taught. I was top of my class at Fort Salem, actually…” her expression turned contemplative and she looked genuinely like she had been hit with some sort of nostalgia. “You learn a lot, playing around with death. Including the importance of life, death, and the lifecycle. Life, becomes death, becomes life again,” and suddenly, her gaze was a million miles away, reliving, no doubt, memories of her time spent in that creepy-ass morgue they had for their Necro division. Raelle had only been in a handful of times, but each one had felt…loaded. Leaden with the whispers of those passed, and heady with the possibilities of what Necros could do with those whispers, if given adequate time and training. 

It hit her, then. She had been on the same base, had trekked the same ground, as Thirteen. They could very well have been classmates: Necros sort of followed a different path than the rest of the recruits, but it was entirely possible, Raelle realized, that she and Thirteen could have actually crossed paths while at Fort Salem, and she had been none the wiser. The thought gave her pause, and made her shiver. 

“I may hate the military, but I do have to admit: they made me stronger. Stronger than I thought I could be. It’s partially because of them, you know. That they can’t break me. Pretty fucked up, isn’t it? Alder told me I had an iron will, right before she fed me glass. Quartermaine tried to slice into my memories. Very unpleasant sensation, I’m sure they subjected you to it at War College, but I bet they stopped before it became too painful. Spree don’t: they want to make sure that if you’re caught, their information is safe. Imagine, though, if I hadn’t been found out? Between Spree and Military training, I’d be unstoppable,” a wistful, mischievous glint showed in her eyes for only a moment before it disappeared, replaced with a hapless shrug, “But, the best laid plans.”

“How were you caught?” Raelle asked, morbidly curious despite herself. 

Thirteen snorted. “Careful now, Private Collar. You’d think you were actually interested in me. Don’t want your superiors getting wind of that,” she winked. 

Raelle felt herself flush and she glanced away, face burning even more when Thirteen started laughing.

“Don’t look away, beautiful. You’re cute when you blush,” and then she tilted her head to the side and Raelle felt her ears burn. 

She bit the inside of her cheek. “You said they kept you for a while at Fort Salem, to interrogate you?”

“Yes. In the morgue. In a cell. A very medieval cell. Very similar to this one, actually, except the walls weren’t white and the lights didn’t light the entire room. And all I had was a chair, so really, this is a snazzy upgrade,”

“Hardly deserved,”

Thirteen shrugged. “Still against the Geneva Convention but I guess, when the US military does it, it doesn’t count, hm?” she pointedly looked at Raelle, who looked away despite herself. 

Thirteen tilted her head, “I’m curious, Private Collar, have you ever given any thought to any of this?”

“Any of what?”

“Any of this. This island. This camp. Cotton Mather Detention Camp. You do remember good ol’ Cotton Mather, don’t you? Prosecutor for the Trials. Convicted hundreds as witches and condemned so many to burn, or hang. Or, in Giles Cory’s case…to be crushed. Something truly poetically ironic about naming an island used to house terrorists who won’t confess as ‘Corey Isle’, and then naming the detention center after the one persecuting him, no?”

Raelle felt her stomach drop and she swallowed. She’d known the names, of course: they’d rung a bell. She’d studied history like any other witch. She knew about the Trials because they were a huge part of the Accord, for why she was even allowed to live in the first place. 

Allowed to live. The thought sent shivers down her spine. 

She knew the names but she didn’t know what they were, not really. The military had names for many things, and it was easy to lose track of all of them. Myths, legends, actual people…they all blended together when she wasn’t in history class. 

“Not to mention the names of the two camps! Oyer and Terminer. The name of the court originally commissioned during the Trials. Sensing a bit of a…violent pattern here, Collar? This camp was set up for one thing, and one thing only. I’ll leave you to your own conclusions, though I think it’s all fairly clear. Not really ones for subtlety, the military,” she rolled her eyes. “So I’ll ask you again, Private Collar: have you really thought about any of this? About what this really is? A ‘top-secret’ detention camp, hidden from the world and named after our prosecutors, our tormentors. Our killers. Named after those who died per their orders, per their courts. And you’re out there, fighting for them. And in here. Torturing us for them.”

“I’m not-” Raelle started, shaking her head, but Sixteen-hundred continued.

“Have you ever noticed how there really isn’t a schedule here, Private Collar? How the lights are always on, even though it may be the middle of the night or mid-day? How our mealtimes change, our guards change, and they change daily. They have you on random rotations to different cells every shift. Ever thought as to why you have knock rotations? Why they don’t want to put us to sleep for transfers unless we put up so much of a fight that they physically have to? Have you thought about why you do this? Where the intel the military collects comes from? How they get it? And what do you do with it, but use it to fight to protect civilian lives that you can’t even properly protect at home, let alone abroad. What do you do with it, but sign your lives away to end up in the same prison as me?”

“I-” Raelle started, surprised by the fire burning, hot and bright, in Sixteen-hundred’s eyes. Still, Raelle pressed on, “It’s not the same! I’m nothing like you, and I’m not in here for the same reasons you are. You’re a terrorist. You’re inside the cell,”

Sixteen-hundred scoffed, “Oh, and you’re so free? What separates us, Private Collar, but a cell door? You’re stuck in here, same as me. You were assigned here and you had no say in the matter, same as me. You’ll be shipped off to wherever they send you next, and you won’t have a say in the matter. Same as me. They’ll hand you a flag when someone in your unit dies and you couldn’t save them, and they’ll say ‘she was a good soldier’ and they’ll send you out there to meet the same fate, over and over until you join her in the ground, one way or another, and you’ll never have a say in the matter. Never forget it, Private Collar: the only difference between you and I, is that my chains are physical.”

It felt like a slap in the face, and Raelle recoiled from the words as they hit her, full force, but she tried to hide it immediately after. It was useless, though: Sixteen-hundred had seen the reaction, her own expression stony and deathly serious, something like anger or loathing boiling right beneath the surface.

It sent a shiver down Raelle’s spine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay but like...Scylla's right though. I think this is one of my favorite dialogues between them. Also, I'm like 95% certain that the Geneva Convention is a thing in the MFS universe (I distinctly remember it being brought up?) and also, I spent a lot of time on the Salem Witch Trial Wikipedia. I added one or two other little nods to the Trials throughout the fic but they're pretty subtle, as well as just trying to fit in some other fun, pop culture witch references (mostly in the last names of the guards).
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed! :)


	9. A Request

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovely readers! Updating a day-ish late, had an appointment out of town yesterday and when I got home a storm had knocked out our internet. Homophobia at its finest...
> 
> Anyway, nothing to know for this chapter either, pretty straight-forward. We're officially half-way through the fic! 
> 
> Enjoy! :)

Raelle didn’t know what to make of the words that continued to ring in her skull. 

_“The only difference between you and I, is that my chains are physical,”_

They were persistent, like her tinnitus the first time a mine had gone off near her at City Drop, and they gave her a headache. 

Everything about Cotton Mather gave her a headache. 

She knew. Of course she knew: according to Abigail, everyone knew that Cotton Mather was _the_ detention camp. It was _the_ place for information extraction, and how one behaved there determined their fate. Release wasn’t possible for any of them, but Grays could be scheduled for extraction and placed in high-security prisons in their respective home countries or states – in exchange for favors from those places. Yellows and Oranges had a say in their fate, depending on if they cooperated or not, and Reds…Reds either lived out the rest of their days at Cotton Mather, or they were extracted and…

And what, Raelle didn’t know, but she had an inkling. It wouldn’t surprise her if they were executed. And they deserved that, for their actions. Thirteen deserved that, for taking so many lives so swiftly. 

And what of Raelle herself? 

_My chains are physical._

She would never kill like that. She would never do most of what the people locked up at Cotton Mather had done. She would never do that…without orders. And if she disobeyed those orders? If she refused them?

She’d had a…small taste of that, with Tally. She’d acted out after their mission to stop the Spree convoy during City Drop. She wouldn’t stop talking about it, making trouble about it, and it very nearly ended up with the entire unit not getting into War College, but Petra Bellweather had intervened on her daughter’s behalf. Tally ended up receiving some sort of “demerit”. Raelle had no idea how Tally spent that punishment: had no idea what her punishment even truly was, but it had been…effective wasn’t the right word. It had shut Tally up, but there was still a storm in her eyes where once there had been nothing but righteous conviction. 

What would they have done, had Tally continued to make a ruckus?

Raelle doubted they’d send her to Cotton Mather as an actual detainee…but she couldn’t say they wouldn’t send her somewhere else. 

And she’d always known that about the military, really. But she was only trying to survive. Weren’t they all? 

It made her head hurt and her teeth ache, and though she didn’t really speak with Thirteen after that conversation, the words resounded in her skull. Even after completing her last few shifts before being sent back to Gray, and even in her first few shifts in Gray. At the very least, being back in Gray was a nice reprieve. Schedules in Gray were actually schedules. Everything had a rhythm and everyone knew it, and she found herself silently thankful that she hadn’t been sent to Red for her first shifts at Cotton Mather. 

And it was just when she was starting to feel like she could breathe again – when Sixteen-hundred’s words started to fade into the din of inmates sharing a meal and laughing and socializing in the Mess Hall, and Raelle didn’t wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night to the fading nightmare of cold blue eyes watching her – was of course when Thirteen decided to reassert herself and her seeming hold on Raelle’s consciousness.

“Specialist Collar,”

Raelle looked up from where she was changing out of her guard uniform and into her more comfortable base attire, just finishing putting on her boots. 

Hobbs stood there, looking at her. “Finish lacing up, and follow me,”

Raelle furrowed her brow but did what she was told.

_Ever the good solider_ , a malicious voice said in her head, and she shoved it down. 

She stood and followed Hobbs, Glory sending her a questioning look and Raelle shrugging in return before they left the room. They walked, lockstep, out of the building. Out of Terminer and then past Oyer, onward beyond the grounds of the camps and to the barracks and administration buildings, one of which they entered and traipsed down a set of stairs before arriving at an office with Hobbs' name on it. 

She ushered Raelle in and shut the door behind her. 

“Please, Specialist Collar. Sit,” 

Raelle again did as she was told, taking in the room. Bland and sterile, like most things in the military. 

Lt. Hobbs sat at her desk and fixed Raelle with a very serious stare, and Raelle felt herself unintentionally straighten in her chair, just in case. 

“We have been given…a very rare opportunity,” Hobbs said finally, after a long, contemplative pause in which she spent far too much time eyeing Raelle as though she were hiding something. 

Which she wasn’t, but under such a gaze, she almost felt like she was. And that was unnerving. 

Raelle nodded to show she was listening, but otherwise didn’t know how to respond.

Hobbs leaned forward on her desk, elbows planted, and interlocked her fingers, her gaze still unwavering. “I have to ask you to seriously consider what it is I am about to tell you. Do not take this lightly: the fate of many rests on how you answer. Quartermaine tells me you are a gifted fixer, and that your linking has improved vastly during your time at Fort Salem,”

Raelle raised her eyebrows. “I…I mean, I guess?”

“We have had a…request, come through. It was reported to us by an officer currently on rotation in Red that Detainee Thirteen is…willing to talk,”

Raelle felt her palms start to sweat, but resisted the urge to wipe them on her pants, instead focusing on keeping her expression neutral. As neutral as Hobb’s careful façade. 

Hobbs tapped her fingers together, clearly thinking about how she would word whatever she had to say next, and Raelle felt her heart hammer in her chest. Thirteen wanted to talk, great. What did that have to do with her? 

“What does that have to do with me?” she blurted. 

One of Hobbs' eyebrows ticked up, but otherwise, she seemed unaffected by Raelle’s outburst. 

“It seems Thirteen has taken a liking to you. She said she is willing to talk, on the condition that you are the one who links with her. On the condition that you are her Interrogating Officer,”

“But I don’t do interrogations-” Raelle started.

Hobbs held up her hand to stop her, “We know that, but this is of the utmost priority. Thirteen is believed to be in possession of Spree secrets and intel that could blow this war wide open, and turn it in our favor. We know next to nothing from her. If she is willing to talk, we have to be willing to listen. She has withstood some of our most rigorous interrogations. Her will is ironclad. If she is coming to us willingly, we must seize this opportunity. 

“You would not be alone in the interrogation room. None of our Interrogators ever are. You will be surrounded by other officers who are highly trained and who have dealt with Thirteen before. We will do everything we can to assure your safety, and we will not force you. I won’t sugarcoat it: Thirteen is dangerous. She has seriously injured more than one of her interrogators, on more than one occasion. You accepting this would be a great service to your country, but we cannot force you. It is your choice, but I feel I must emphasize to you the extreme importance of this detainee. She has been here now for over two years and has never come willingly to us: I must strongly encourage you to consider this before you make your decision.”

Raelle felt her mouth drop open, but Hobbs continued before she could even begin to process her words. 

“Should you accept, we will work quickly and prepare with you, and your service will not be forgotten by any one of us here, Specialist Collar. A witch stationed here always remembers those who have put themselves on the line for their country, and you would be the most exemplary of all,”

_Aren’t we all putting our lives on the line for this country?_ She wanted to ask, but again pushed the traitorous voice down, feeling a headache coming on. 

“I…will think about it,” she said instead, which got a curt nod from Hobbs. 

“Wonderful. We await your decision, Specialist Collar. You are dismissed,”

\---

“You’re going to do it though, right?” Abigail asked, serious.

Raelle sighed, furrowing her brow and rubbing her temple with the finger she was using to mentally connect to her unit back at Fort Salem. She’d been granted special permission for the magical call: they were on a strict schedule on when such spells could be performed, and she was bumped up immediately when she asked. Clearly, all of her superiors already knew that their most difficult detainee had asked for Raelle, specifically, to reveal all of her secrets to. The perks were already being rolled out, along with the pressure.

“I don’t know, Abigail,” she groaned, “I don’t know. She’s dangerous,”

“Aren’t they all?”

Raelle sighed, “They are, but Thirteen seems to be especially so. They treat her like a ticking time bomb. You should see the list of precautions they sent me that they pledge to take if I agree to the terms. It’s as long as Tally’s leg.”

“Hey!” Tally butted in, but laughed. “Well that’s a good thing though, isn’t it? It means they’re taking this very seriously. Sounds like she’s a priority,”

“She is. She’s been here for over two years and they haven’t gotten anything out of her, apparently.” 

A low whistle from Abigail, “Gotta admire that tenacity, I guess,”

“In a terrorist?”

“In anyone. It’s not easy to not break, some of the shit we hear they do. Have you heard anything, Raelle?” Abigail asked.

“No, I’m not an Interrogator, I’m just on rotation in the prison,”

“So, I guess…why wouldn’t you do it?” Tally spoke up. 

Raelle sighed again, “I guess…I don’t know. Thirteen she’s…she’s tricky. They say she showed the last people she linked with her attack on the mall, over and over and over again. I just…I can’t see that. I don’t want to see that. And I don’t think she’ll actually give me any information. We’ve…talked, but not enough that she trusts me. She kind of hates anything military, so…”

“So you think she’s just doing this for kicks?” Abigail tried.

“Maybe,” Raelle said, “But that’s not really her style, either. She likes playing mind games. Likes trying to make people question themselves. I do think she’s up to something,” Raelle shifted in her seat, leaning it back onto two legs. “But I don’t know what,”

“And it’s not like you can just ask her,” Abigail muttered.

“Maybe she thinks you won’t do it?” Tally offered.

“I thought about that, honestly,” Raelle confessed. “But that seems like such a…stupid thing to do? And if there’s one thing she’s not, it’s stupid. Like…what purpose would calling my bluff like that serve?”

Abigail snorted, “I don’t know, she’s a terrorist. Egoism, maybe?”

“But on the other hand, what does she have to gain if I say yes? She has to know it’s possible, even if she thinks I’ll say no. So if I say yes I…what, foil her plans for me to say no? That doesn’t make any sense…”

“So she wants you to say yes, then,” Tally surmised.

Raelle nodded to herself, “Signs point to yes,”

“So…you’re gonna do it, right?” Abigail reiterated, and Raelle rolled her eyes. 

“I feel like if I say yes, I’m walking into a trap. Like…why me? I can’t be the only one who talks to her. I know for a fact that she talks to everyone. Whether or not they talk back is another story, but…”

“But she chose you,” Tally completed Raelle’s thought.

“Yeah,”

“Look, Raelle. We could spend all night going over the whys and the how comes and question her motivations but at the end of the day, you won’t find out unless you say yes, because without linking with her, she could just lie to you. The question is: do you want to take the risk to find out your answer? And possibly, risk intelligence that could save lives?”

Raelle sighed, rubbing her temple again, “I just don’t know. Would you do it?”

“Yes,” Abigail said confidently. “Are you kidding? Get into the mind of the enemy? See what they know? Absolutely.”

“I don’t know,” Tally said honestly. “But if there was a chance to save lives…I think I would. But really, Raelle, you know what’s happening better than we do. You know her better than we do. But if she does have valuable information…”

“And if she doesn’t?” Raelle interrupted. 

“Well, if you say no, we’ll never know,” Abigail pointed out.

“And if I say yes?”

She heard Abigail sigh. “Guess we’ll find out,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh-hohoho *rubs hands together*, Scylla's up to somethinggg, and Raelle knows it. They know each other so well already. The chemistry between these two, man. Fascinating stuff to write! 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, thanks for reading and commenting and kudos-ing, makes me smile. :)


	10. Trap

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovely readers! :D I'm back with an update for you, thank you all so much for the wonderful reviews on the last chapter! This chapter is a bit heavy so make sure you take a look at the warnings before diving in: poor Raelle doesn't get any and she might have wanted one...
> 
> Warnings/things of note for this chapter:  
> -This is the gore chapter. There is some detail, so I suppose, trigger warning for fire, blood, bone, and state-sanctioned murder/execution. I can't say it's not explicit but I tried not to go into too much detail in general, but the images are written to be horrifying, so just know that going in.  
> -I know in canon they say that Scylla's parents were murdered while she hid in the garage: I wrote this scene before she confirmed that, but we all already knew that her parents were executed by the military. As such, my version may be a bit more...traumatic, than canon. Or at least, than what Scylla says happens in canon. Poor Necro bb has not had a good time in this fic...
> 
> Take care of yourselves and enjoy (as much as one can given the dark themes in this one...)!

She said yes. 

She almost didn’t. Because she was almost sure it was a trap, of some sort. Maybe she was being paranoid, but something felt…off. Why would Thirteen, a hardened Spree agent – who hadn’t broken despite trained Interrogators doing their best – suddenly crumble for Raelle? She knew that Thirteen had a soft spot for her: she flirted whenever she could, and Raelle had done her best to not engage with that aspect of their relationship at all. 

Thirteen was beautiful, and actually Raelle’s type, honestly, but she knew better than to look beyond the blood on her hands. Raelle was, after all, the daughter of a civilian. The product of love between two distinct worlds. It could have easily been her father, at that mall: he could have been among the multitude of people that Sixteen-hundred had sent to their deaths. He could have been one of hundreds of fathers who lost their lives that day. And he hadn’t done anything to hurt witchkind. He had done nothing but love them. 

But even if Thirteen was doing it because she’d taken a liking to Raelle...no, that didn’t make sense. Raelle didn’t buy that, honestly. Thirteen wasn’t the type to just divulge secrets she’d kept locked up inside despite the military’s best attempts to crack her open. Just because she’d taken a liking to Raelle didn’t mean that she actually wanted to divulge Spree secrets to her. Just because she seemed to think that she and Raelle were similar, Raelle had given her no reason to believe that was actually true, nor for her to believe that Raelle agreed with anything she said, either. Raelle knew that Thirteen didn’t just have a change of heart because she’d spoken to a woman she found attractive. 

It didn’t make any sense, and when she’d brought up that “Why me?” concern to Hobbs, Hobbs had largely dismissed it with a simple “We do not look gift horses in the mouth. The ‘why’ is hardly important,” except that it _was_ important, and Raelle couldn’t think of a way to properly articulate that. She may not have known Thirteen for very long, but even she knew that Thirteen was calculating. Cunning. The “why” was very much important, but if Alder had gotten word that Thirteen was willing to talk…well. Alder had blinders on when it came to the Spree: she would do anything to get into their heads. Even if it meant ignoring obvious red flags.

When Raelle had pushed Hobbs on the why, she crumbled a little, saying that they found it suspicious too, but that they really couldn’t take any chances. Thirteen was, it was divulged, considered of highest priority to national security in the entirety of Cotton Mather. Which meant, by extension, that she was a national priority. If they had even a shred of a chance to get something out of her…they had to go for it. 

In the end, Raelle had little choice. All her talk with Hobbs told her was that the military was willing to throw her to a wolf if it meant getting scraps. It was obvious that, really, the choice had been made for her: the interrogation was going to happen, one way or another. She may as well make it look like she came willingly.

So she said yes. 

\---

The entire thing was set up meticulously. She was briefed multiple times before the actual interrogation date. They were going to have that room full of Interrogators that Hobbs had mentioned, all at the ready, should Thirteen decide to try something. It was obvious from the precautions, let alone Hobb’s confirmation of it, that they sensed a bit of a trap too, and that didn’t help Raelle’s unease at the whole situation. She truly was so disposable to them... 

She forced the thought out of her head every time it crept up. Of course she was disposable. She was a soldier, and it was national security. That’s what she was expected to die for anyway, no matter what. 

She’d pushed the thoughts down, intent on listening to and memorizing the entire plan at every briefing. 

It was a simple set up, really. Hobbs, Graves, and two other officers would personally escort Thirteen from her cell to the interrogation room in Oyer. Raelle herself followed a few other lieutenants through the halls of the mysterious interrogation building. Unlike Terminer, it was dimly lit. Ominous in its darkness. It set her teeth on edge, walking into a maze of unfamiliar halls, lined with doors magically sealed shut. The air inside of the building was stiflingly still, and it seemed to Raelle that the entire thing was designed to just feel _off_. The hall felt too narrow, the doors too wide, the few lights too bright but not enough to penetrate the darkness that permeated everything around them. Even walking into the building, and even being surrounded by officers and Specialists as she was, Raelle felt a strange hopelessness creep up within her. 

These halls had seen some shit, and Raelle could feel it, and it made her skin crawl. 

How long were prisoners kept in Oyer? How long were they interrogated? Hours? Days? Longer? 

Raelle didn’t want to think of the answer, because it made her nauseous. The whole thing had her on edge, nervous, jumpy. Those around her picked up on it, but misinterpreted its source: assuring her that they would be right there, ready to go if anything happened. None of the guards would be able to touch Raelle nor Thirteen during the actual linking, but they were to be close: inches away, essentially. And at the first sign of trouble, they had their orders. One of them, Bramblebush, spoke amicably with Raelle in a way that made Raelle think she was trying to be reassuring. Her voice was soothing, but it had the opposite effect on Raelle. It was even more disconcerting. 

“I’ve dealt with Sixteen-hundred before, Specialist Collar. She’s tricky but she’s nothing we can’t handle. We’ve been doing it for the better part of two years-”

That wasn’t very comforting. It was nice to know, yes, that of the entire assembled team for the interrogation, nearly all of them had experience with Thirteen. Those who didn’t, were still familiar with dealing with Reds. Everyone was an officer: no rotation guards. People in that interrogation room with her were seasoned veterans of Cotton Mather. 

But that didn’t matter. They were prepared for whatever may happen, but only to respond to a threat from Thirteen…not entirely to prevent one from happening.

There were other security measures for that, at least. Thirteen’s hands would be cuffed to the table. Chains on her feet, locked into the ground. There would be a few officers behind Raelle, ready to pull her out of whatever happened, if something happened. The rest of the officers would be positioned behind Thirteen, ready to put her to sleep, ready to do whatever it took to keep Raelle safe. 

It wasn’t comforting in the slightest. Her heart pounded harder and harder with each step, until they reached their designated room: a bland door just like every other one, slightly too large and slightly too wide and with no handle, only able to be opened with the right seed. 

Graves opened it, revealing a room that looked like little more than a dungeon with a table in it. A table, two chairs facing each other on opposite ends, and four officers already stationed behind a figure strapped in, exactly as they said she would be. Yet despite the chains...a smile on her face and an almost gloating look dancing in her eyes. 

They’d entered from a different entrance: Raelle caught sight of the outline of the other door, despite the poor lighting. The space was crowded, between the officers behind Thirteen and the four that stepped in behind Raelle. One of her own team, who had entered ahead of Raelle, ushered her in, and she couldn’t look away from those piercing blue eyes.

_What are you planning?_ she thought, and nearly turned immediately around to leave when Thirteen quirked an eyebrow, as though she’d read her goddamn mind. 

But Raelle didn’t turn around, despite the goosebumps that erupted on her skin. Instead, she steeled herself and entered the interrogation cell. Four officers entered behind her and took their places at her back, while two others remained out in the hall, standing guard outside. They shut and sealed the door. 

Raelle sat on the only empty chair, face to face with Thirteen. For the first time, without a door between them. For the first time…outside of a cell.

Or, well. 

In a different one. 

“Specialist Collar. So kind of you to agree to do this with me,” Thirteen said, in a way that implied that she knew very well that Raelle had not willingly agreed to any of it. 

Graves spoke over her. “Specialist Collar,” she thundered. Raelle caught a miffed expression cross Thirteen’s face, “You are calling the shots here. We follow your lead,”

“Oh, high and mighty now, aren’t you?” Thirteen quirked an eyebrow at Raelle, her grin positively predatory. The sound of chains clanging together indicated that she was bouncing her foot, but she stopped and straightened in her seat, leaning forward ever so slightly and pulling, however subtly, on her cuffed wrists.

The chain on the cuffs was short, and had been threaded through a metal loop on the table. The table that was bolted to the ground. Thirteen was truly stuck, and it looked like they’d made her cuffs too tight. She rubbed at them where they probably chafed at her wrists, but Raelle knew that they were tamper-proof: that was part of the safety precautions. The locks could only be unlocked with vocal work, and Thirteen was currently incapable of that, the collar still securely fastened around her neck. Not to mention that she wouldn't know the seed needed to unlock it. 

Raelle put her hands on the table. 

She knew what she had to do. She knew how to link with people. Willing participants were much easier, and she hadn’t really been briefed on any interrogation techniques beyond the War College standard. They’d had to do linking drills too, of course. To learn how to extract information from an unwilling mind. But it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t her specialty. It caused pain, and Raelle’s first instinct was to never do that. Her instinct was to relieve it. It had taken a lot for her to complete that training, and she’d sworn to herself she would never use it to that extent again unless she absolutely had to.

Not that she figured she would need to. Thirteen certainly would not crumble to Raelle’s pathetic attempts at interrogative linking if she’d yet to crack under much worse circumstances, and with much more highly trained Interrogators. 

“I have to say, this is very Fort Salem. Take away the table and replace you with Anacostia Quartermaine and you basically have my first prison experience. With fewer eyes on me, of course. It was kept under wraps. Couldn’t let the world know that Spree had infiltrated Fort Salem, now could they?” she winked. “Good times,”

With that, Thirteen stopped fussing with her cuffs and laid her hands out, palms up. 

“Shall we?” she said, with an eyebrow quirk.

Despite herself, Raelle reached forward. Truthfully…she was as ready as she ever would be. She clenched her jaw as she hovered her palms over Thirteen’s forearms. She could link with her like that, she knew, but she also knew it wouldn’t be a strong connection, so she took a quick breath and let her palms drop.

Thirteen’s skin was surprisingly soft, and Thirteen gently closed her fingers around Raelle’s forearms.

_“Scylla!”_

_The scream reverberated, loud._

_“Scylla! Get down! Go!”_

_It was pure chaos. Everywhere. There were screams, and heat. So much heat, it burned and she could taste ash in her mouth._

_“Go!” the woman was yelling._

_People were on the ground. Bodies. Blackened, burned, mutilated. Torn to pieces from shrapnel._

_There was so much noise, so much goddamn noise! Her ears were ringing and she could barely hear her mother yelling at her to leave, but she couldn’t move. They were all…gone. One minute they were there and the next they’d been blown to bits. Planks of wood from the floor and walls and even ceiling hung loose and mingled among splintered limbs and mangled faces. Her heartbeat roared in her ears._

_Her mother was screaming at her to leave, and all she could see were the tears, leaving a trail of pale skin, exposed beneath a layer of ash and blood. She was bleeding from a gash that split her face nearly in half._

_She could see into her flesh. The white smeared with red of what she would only realize later was exposed bone. The deep red of facial muscle. And her blue eyes, bloodshot. The red made the blue stand out even more, and for a moment, all she could think about was how beautiful her mother’s eyes were, and she’d never noticed it before._

_“Scylla!” her mother was telling her something but the ringing was too loud, so she could only squint at her, trying to hear. Trying to see through the grime, to read burned and peeling and bleeding lips._

_She had blood on her teeth._

_But they walked into the room, then. One with a piece of paper in hand, another shouting at her father, pulling out a scourge and using it to knock him to the ground._

_She opened her mouth but she couldn’t tell if any sound came out._

_Her mother’s hands, shoving her, snapped her out of it. She fell, stumbled back, feeling splintered wood cut into her calves as she tripped backwards. Instinct drove her to hide: one minute she was falling, the next she was behind a pile of burnt wood, pretending to be dead, pretending to be a plank, pretending to be invisible._

_She couldn’t hear what they said, but she saw them. Uniforms. US Military Police._

_She couldn’t hear, she couldn’t hear! They were talking and her parents were begging._

_“Resisting arrest”_

_“Criminals”_

_“Dodgers”_

_“Traitors”_

_She covered her ears, trying to control the shaking._

_“Dodging is treason. Treason is punishable by immediate execution”_

_“By the power vested in us by the US Military and the Salem Accord, you have committed treason in the eyes of the law of the United States of America. By the power of Oyer and Terminer, the sentence is execution by fire.”_

_“It’s just such a damn shame,” said one_

_“It is, but they had their chance,” said the other, regretful. “Need to make an example”_

_“Please-“_

_The seed seared itself into her brain as it ignited the room around it, starting with her parents. She could only watch as they fell to their knees, engulfed in hungry orange flames. The screams haunted her: inhuman. It had to be what hell sounded like, and she had been closer to it than most. She had heard the quiet rush of the River Styx. The screams sounded like the souls that whispered to her in the night, but louder. Full of pain and suffering, and she was sure she screamed, because her throat hurt, but the room was nothing more than heat and flame and the smell of burning flesh and she pushed away from her hiding spot only to feel it give beneath her: a corpse._

_The feel of scorched flesh seared her skin and the screams, they were so loud, screams of the damned and decrepit, of the dead and the dying, passing from one plane to another and tearing a hole between worlds with their voices while they did it._

_Her throat burned and her skin bubbled as she ran forward, the officers gone and the blackened bones of her mother’s strong jaw and her father’s toothy grin had her retching, smoke filling her lungs, ashes of her loved ones, of the few she had, oh goddess –_

Raelle jerked away, but not fast enough: in less than an instant, Scylla had her in a vice-grip.

“Stay,” she growled. “It’s your turn,”

_Raelle’s own mother’s eyes stared back at her, her smile beautiful and wide. “Raelle,” she said, so full of love. So full of life. Until her hair ignited at the edges, and her mouth opened in a silent scream, eyes blackening as the flames engulfed her._

It was a nightmare that Raelle had had too many times after they told her.

The connection was severed and Raelle snapped back into herself, sweating profusely, startled. She sucked in a breath and before she could process, she was being dragged out of the room, the chaos around her almost as overwhelming as what she had just seen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know: I'm sorry! But Scylla has her reasons for showing Raelle that traumatic event, promise! It's actually pivotal to this entire story, and a major turning point, but poor Raelle was NOT ready for that. Lbr none of us were ready for it, I tried to warn you! 
> 
> I promise that that's it for tormenting Raelle, I don't like doing that to her. Both of them have really been through too much. Anyway, drop a line if I didn't traumatize you too much! Thanks for continuing to read and enjoy!


	11. Darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again lovely readers! Glad to see you all liked the last chapter, honestly it was also a favorite of mine to write (I have a lot of favorite scenes in this honestly), so I'm glad it wasn't too traumatizing! Except maybe to poor Raelle...
> 
> No warnings for this chapter, and nothing really to note, so without further ado let's get on with it!
> 
> Enjoy! :)

Graves had a broken nose. The debriefing had to be put off for nearly a full day for all of the injuries the supposedly “expert” Interrogators had sustained in their fight to stop Scylla from whatever the hell it was she had tried to do. Whatever it was she had done.

It’d shaken Raelle to her core. There were bruises on her arm from where Scylla had gripped her: bruises she hadn’t even noticed. Her left palm pulsed as though it had actually been burned and cut at the same time. Her head had been pounding for hours and her hearing had been going in and out. Fire crept up on her every time she closed her eyes. Flames licked and clawed at her insides anytime she blinked. Those warm blue eyes covered in blood before being boiled out of their skull, not of her own mother…but of Scylla’s, haunted every dark corner of her mind. 

The military had executed Scylla’s parents, in cold blood, right in front of her. And they’d just…left, after doing it. After reading the sentence and performing the execution, leaving the safe house they’d been in to burn. With Scylla inside of it. 

With Scylla inside of it, and witness to her own parents’ gruesome murder. 

Tried for treason and executed without trial.

That would certainly…fuck someone up. It was fucking Raelle up. Her hands shook as she waited outside of the office for the official debrief. She had to lace her fingers together once in the room to not show just how fucking shell-shocked she was. Her foot tapped without her permission and she just let it. She couldn’t look at any of her superiors in the eye. She couldn’t do anything but stare forward and clench and unclench her jaw. 

Graves had been on the receiving end of a backwards head butt, an apparent specialty and favorite of Detainee Thirteen. Bramblebush had received a blow directly to the throat – and, based on the bruise, it had been a strong one – and two other interrogators had received black eyes and various scratches from their attempts to restrain Scylla Ramshorn. One had gotten a kick, apparently, despite Scylla having been supposedly chained to the floor. 

Another officer didn’t make the meeting because she’d received a concussion from a blow to the temple, the steel from the handcuffs causing quite a bit of damage, and Hobbs looked like she was so incredibly done that it would have been funny, were Raelle capable of forming a smile in that moment. 

“Debriefing. Mission status: unsuccessful. Specialist Collar is unharmed but was pulled out when the mission failed. Detainee Thirteen injured six officers before we were able to make her sleep. She was returned to Red Wing and has since been stripped of all privileges excepting the barest of necessities. Plan of action for proper punishment is under review,”

“What…” Raelle interrupted, and all eyes on the room went to her. She clenched and unclenched her jaw. They were in an odd room, with a long table, everyone sat at least one seat away from each other, with Hobbs on one end and Raelle on the other. Hobbs was talking into a phone set up on the table, but no one seemed to be on the other end. Or, if they were: they didn’t say anything. “I don’t…one minute I was linked, the next minute I was being yanked into the hall. What happened? How long was I in there?”

“You were there for less than five minutes, Specialist,” Hobbs said tersely. “Once you linked, you looked immediately distressed, but you didn’t pull away. Not at first,” she pursed her lips, “But then you did. You flinched away, but she grabbed you. Somehow, some way, she broke her cuffs. She had you a split-second before we could act. But we did. She fought back. Nailed Graves right as she came up behind her and tried to put her to sleep. Got a quick shot in on Bramblebush before anyone could grab her. Tried to go for another throat after but thankfully was unsuccessful. Once they had her, she just kept thrashing. We got you out of there because she was dangerous, and loose. We could have never foreseen that coming, and for that, we sincerely apologize,”

Raelle shut her eyes, pressing her palms into them. 

Fire burned behind her eyelids and she quickly opened them. 

“She…broke her cuffs? The ones that can’t be unlocked except with vocal magic? How is that possible?”

Hobbs pursed her lips even further. She turned, then, to the chair behind her. There was a box on it, which was the file and evidence for the incident. She pulled a bag from it and threw it onto the table, where it slid to a stop near Raelle, who reached forward and grabbed the evidence bag.

The steel cuffs were within. Sure enough: there was what appeared to be a clean cut…not on the cuff itself, but on the chain right underneath it. 

She’d broken the fucking chain.

“How-” Raelle started, and then immediately shut her mouth. 

Those little adjustments she’d been doing. Fidgeting with the metal around her wrist. Making it look like it was uncomfortable when really, she was just…doing something else. 

But what else? 

“We don’t know how. Her collar has been checked by an officer from Fort Salem. Despite appearing perfectly fine, we fitted her with a new, more severe one. Only time will tell if her first one had been tampered with at all, or enough to allow her to perform any vocal work. Do you have any ideas as to how she could have done this, Specialist Collar?”

Raelle opened her mouth, but shut it a moment later. Wordless work was…certainly known of. Seedless work was…possible, but never very powerful. So much so that they hadn’t been shown any in their training. Not even in War College. 

“It’s possible that the chain was tampered with beforehand. We will have to do an entire sweep of the island. It’s also possible that her magic manifested in a new way due to adrenaline. Nearly anything is possible,” Hobbs said seriously, clearly frustrated. “And what’s more, we are no closer to any answers,”

Raelle refrained from saying “I told you so”. It wasn’t the moment for gloating. 

\---

The fluorescent lights of Terminer hurt her eyes even more than usual, when she was allowed to return. After debrief, she was given a few days’ temporary leave, which left Glory with a million questions that thankfully, with one look at Raelle, she didn’t ask. 

Raelle knew she looked terrible, but how could she not? Anytime she closed her eyes, she saw it…saw blood running down her mother’s face. Scylla’s mother’s face. Saw those bright blue eyes as they dimmed, engulfed in flames. Saw and heard the order of execution. Felt the ringing in her ears reverberate throughout her entire skull, the stench of burnt bodies filling her nostrils. 

She awoke from nightmares with her cheeks wet from crying: but were they the memories of Scylla’s tears, or her own? Was it Scylla’s grief she was feeling, heady and boiling like magma, or was it her own?

She felt like a caged animal and she didn’t know what to do with that. Anger simmered up within her without warning, pain that wasn’t hers echoed in her body like sound in a cave. It felt like a dark chasm had been opened within her, and it wasn’t hers and she couldn’t support its weight, couldn’t see to its depths and couldn’t begin to fathom its secrets. And truth be told: she didn’t want to. The more the memories looped, seared into her brain, the more she could feel the chasm, with a gravity of its own, begging her to fall into it. 

The feeling subsided, with time, but far too slowly for her liking. Just like with the memories of that poor cadet who jumped off a building during Beltane, the effects of the linking wore off, but the memories were still there, now. They were hers as well as Scylla’s, too strong to fade despite the darkness that came with them slowly subsiding…Scylla’s darkness, manifested within Raelle. 

This was what Scylla felt…all the time. This was Scylla’s mind, a black hole of pain that threatened to trap anyone and everyone within its gravity. 

But Raelle was not Scylla, and so could not hold onto such despair: only Scylla had that morbid right, if she could dare to call it that. Which was why links always faded: no matter how strong the connections, everyone was their own being. Usually, the effects of linking wore off after a few days, but Raelle could still see the faces of Scylla’s parents as they burned well beyond that. She could still hear their screams echo in the halls of the barracks as she walked back from a shower, or as she wandered the mess hall or reported to Rec. 2 for combat training and conditioning. 

It was…sickening, and traumatizing. And she hadn’t been the one who was truly there: everything she received was a filtered memory. But she had been given it with no warning, with no preparation. 

It all made her feel physically ill. It landed her in the infirmary more than once, which was why she was given a few extra days of leave.

And when she finally did report back to one of her last shifts on Gray…it was the same. 

But everything had changed. Everything about her had changed. 

\---

Gray was dull. It felt…fake. 

No, that wasn’t right. Not fake…but it didn’t feel real, either. It felt like walking in a sterile dream.

How did they do it? How did her fellow guards walk around without so much…pain? She didn’t understand it. 

She’d known pain. It was an old friend, after her mother died. It just became a piece of her. Grief followed her like a shadow. 

But this…this was something else. This was a darkness that permeated despite the fucking fluorescent lights. Even with just the last remnants of it in her mind, it clawed at her. 

Gray was dull. Gray was comfortable and cushy. Gray was boring. Gray couldn’t satiate the anger, the hunger, that still burned, however diluted, within that closing chasm. Gray was too ordered, and she sought chaos. 

And god, if this was what Scylla felt all the goddamn time…

How? 

How did Scylla do it? Live with so much…just so much, pent up inside of her? Storm and fury, indeed. Raelle felt like she’d been awoken from a dream. Like she was suddenly seeing everything for what it truly was for the first time. It was through Scylla’s eyes, through Scylla’s memories. Everything felt acute, her senses felt heightened, and it made her feel nauseous. 

But nothing in Gray, and then in Yellow, had really changed. Just Raelle’s internal struggle. How did people live their lives so dulled to their own senses? So outside of persistent pain that they could go about their day without feeling like they had needles in their veins? 

Glory and others on her rotations talked to her but she felt like she was being spoken to through a glass wall, her first few weeks back. She felt…isolated and separated and like she couldn’t be seen: not really. She’d been through something they hadn’t, and it set them apart. 

Despite the sensations eventually fading, more and more with each passing day…the memories didn’t. They were seared into her mind and she knew there was no way she would be able to forget them. One never really forgot the memories of another mind: by seeing them, they became her own. 

That was also the various healers’ hypothesis for why her linking symptoms lasted far longer than normal. Because the experience was so traumatizing, even second-hand…well, it really wasn’t second-hand. She’d watched it through Scylla’s eyes. She’d experienced everything as though she’d been there. 

It made sense, and she hated it. She hated that Scylla had done that to her. She hated that Scylla had forced her to see that, and then had used Raelle’s own shock and vulnerability to rip memories of her own mother from within her subconscious. 

Scylla’d had no right to do that, and with each passing day, as Scylla’s darkness and hatred subsided, Raelle felt her own begin to rise. 

She was still scheduled for Red. Her rotation hadn’t been altered. She thought that with time, it would all subside, but it didn’t. On her last day in Orange, she couldn’t stop grinding her teeth, especially after their shift. Glory commented on it as they walked out of Terminer and towards the barracks.

“Are you…are you okay?” she asked, serious. 

Raelle glanced sidelong at her, tightening her jaw. 

“No,” she said honestly. 

Glory nodded slowly, more to herself, it seemed, than anything else. 

“Do you um…do you want to talk about it?”

She did. God, she did. She wanted to spew it all out, everywhere, until this new demon she found inside of her was exorcised. She felt…violated. Robbed, of something she didn’t even know she’d had to give. She felt alone, and she felt terrified. Scylla had something on her now. Something she had no right to have. Something she hadn’t asked for but had taken without so much as a warning. 

But Raelle needed to save that fire, that loathing she felt building inside of her, festering. 

She did want to talk about it, but not with Glory and not with the fixers at Cotton Mather and certainly not with any of her superiors. 

She only had one person to talk to about it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oop, Raelle is (understandably) not happy. Tbh I'm glad you guys are loving this story because I really enjoyed writing it and it's so nice to see other people also enjoy it, it's very validating as a content creator so thank you for letting me know! :3


	12. Catharsis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Back again, I'm glad you guys liked the last chapter! Thank you so much for all of the wonderful comments! :D 
> 
> Things of note in this chapter:  
> -The collar mentioned actually doesn't exist in the MFS universe as far as I'm aware, but she did need a new one and clearly the last one wasn't doing it's job, so...  
> -Um...strong language? Not really a warning lmao but it's an emotionally charged situation, so... :P 
> 
> Enjoy!

Despite strict orders from the higher ups not to engage with Thirteen – with Scylla – despite not being assigned to her on her schedule for her second turn in Red and despite the odd look she got from Glory when she asked quietly if they could switch their mealtime detainees…she did speak with Scylla. 

Raelle had to hand it to Glory, truly. She gave her a knowing but questioning look, silently asking Raelle if this had to do with their brief talk that last afternoon on Orange. 

And the answer was yes, and Raelle allowed an ever-so-slight nod. Glory looked uneasy but nodded as well. 

The other guards with them didn’t even notice the switch, which was just as well. 

Raelle grabbed the tray and went right up to the door, trying to keep her breathing in check, despite her heart already accelerating at an alarming rate. Most people, outside of the Interrogators that had been there, were none the wiser about what had happened behind closed doors. Glory knew it had been something, but she hadn’t been told what, and Raelle wasn’t allowed to tell her. She’d been told that Raelle had been temporarily rotated into Interrogation, and Glory had been rotated into Kitchen for that time. 

Upon Raelle’s return, though, and based solely on her mood, Glory had realized she really shouldn’t ask about the sudden reassignment, which was wise. Glory truly was perceptive, and honestly, for that, Raelle was grateful. 

She didn’t even bother to check the door. There really wasn’t any need. Whatever little cutting work Scylla had used on her cuffs wouldn’t work on the goddamn door, and honestly, she didn’t fucking care, at this rate. She yanked open the meal slot, though she had no intention of putting the actual tray through, before bringing her hand up and violently throwing open the window. 

“Breaking protocol, highly unusual,” Scylla said. She was sat on her bed, legs folded, wrists delicately placed on her knees. Her comment lacked its usual bite: just said as an observation, and it almost made Raelle flinch at just how uncharacteristically unsettling it was to hear such monotone words from Detainee Thirteen. 

Raelle stared, temporarily caught off-guard. What...had they done to her? Clearly, they had done something. Her collar was no longer like that of her Red counterparts, but completely black. It spanned from right below her chin down to her collarbones, entirely solid. Raelle’d never seen one like it except…

Except in the history museum at Fort Salem. 

There were bags under her closed eyes, purple and puffy, and damn near all of her right temple was covered in what looked like had been a gnarly bruise. It was now only greenish-yellow, but no doubt, it had been black when she’d gotten it. 

Scylla turned to the door, revealing a black eye that had clearly been much worse when she got it, and a matching green and yellow bruise on her jaw, complementing its counterpart on the opposite side of her face. 

“Ah,” she said, taking Raelle in, her piercing gaze coming into sharper focus and snapping Raelle out of her temporary surprise, “That explains it. Raelle Collar,” she tilted her head, “Never one to follow orders, I see,”

“Don’t-” Raelle said, trying to control the shake in her voice.

She was unsuccessful. She could see it in the way that Scylla quirked an eyebrow, ever so slightly. “Why not? It’s a beautiful name. Befitting of a beautiful woman-”

“Shut up!” Raelle snapped, as quietly as she could so as to not draw attention, “Shut the fuck up, you do _not_ get to call me that!”

Scylla tilted her head, “It’s your name,”

“I don’t give a fuck! You have no right, you don’t-” before she could help herself, she slammed her fist into the door, making a reverberating bang. 

Scylla didn’t even flinch, but Raelle heard immediate commotion behind her so she shouted, “It’s fine,”

“Careful, Collar!” one of the other women yelled, and Raelle clenched her jaw and rolled her eyes, trying to collect herself.

She was shaking, she realized. She was actually fucking shaking. 

“What-” she started, when she felt like she could speak with a steady enough voice. “What the fuck was that?” she looked up and glared directly at Scylla, who had changed positions, getting up from the bed and starting to step forward, “Why the fuck did you do that to me? What is your goddamn problem -”

“I showed you what you needed to see,” Scylla said quietly. She stepped purposefully, but slowly, closer and closer until she was at the door. 

So close, that Raelle could feel her breath as she exhaled. 

“I didn’t need to see fucking anything. None of that. Why? Why…why me?”

Scylla shook her head, “Because you’re like me. You don’t trust them. You’re not one of them,”

“I’m nothing like you!” Raelle hissed. 

“But you are. I didn’t realize how much, but-”

“Shut up!” Raelle interrupted again, “Just shut up! I have no reason to trust you or what you say, or to listen to you. What you did…you had no right! You had no right-”

“I know,” Scylla said, cutting her off, “I know. But I showed you what you had to see. What I needed you to see. What I needed to show you. I couldn’t do it here-”

“I didn’t need to see your parents’ fucking execution!” Raelle snapped. She balled her hands into fists from where she had them braced on the door, leaning on it to steady herself. To stop the goddamn shaking. 

“Neither did I,” Scylla murmured quietly. She clenched her jaw, “But I did. I had to see it, because I wasn’t given a choice. They died because, to the US Military, we’re nothing but property. Things to be disposed of if we don’t serve our purpose to the letter. My parents were against everything the military stands for: conquest and imperialism, in the name of ‘freedom’,” she laughed, the sound hollow, brought home by the bruises on her face, the nearly-healed cuts on her lip and over her eyebrow. “What fucking freedom do we have? How can we spread it around the world if we don’t even have it ourselves? How can you give that which you do not possess? What the military does is spread what it does have: indoctrination and injustice, and for daring to defy that, they killed my parents. For daring to hope for a better world, for being on the run, for never fighting back, always hiding. And for that, they hunted them down like dogs. Like back in the Trials, like back in the Burning Days. No judge, no jury, just executioners. And they sentenced them to burn,” Scylla sneered, her breaths shallow, puffs of air on Raelle’s face as she recognized that breathing pattern: tears. And sure enough, they glistened in Scylla’s eyes, wherein burned a fire as cold as her icy blue eyes. Hatred. Anger. 

For a moment, Raelle saw it in her irises. That darkness she had felt. That rage, that need for chaos. For something to drown out the pain, the chasm of loss and profound sense of injustice. 

Raelle hated that she sympathized: a part of her recognized that pain. A part of her acknowledged that she had only tasted the turmoil that Scylla held inside of her.

“For daring to want a better world for witches, they were killed by their own goddamn kind,”

Raelle blinked, surprised to find her own tears building in her eyes. But like Scylla, she refused to let them fall. She shook her head. 

“That doesn’t fucking matter, you had no right to get into my head like that-”

“I did what I had to do, Raelle,” Scylla said tersely. 

It took everything in her to not punch the door. It took everything in her to not kick the door, to not scream, to not release her own chaos as it sang in her veins, nervous energy. 

It took everything in her to blink and not cry. She bared her teeth and growled, “Don’t _fucking_ call me that!” she sucked in a breath that betrayed just how close to tears she truly was. It was ragged, it got caught in her throat and it burned and she welcomed the pain because at least it served a purpose. 

It served a purpose. 

“You took that from me!” she hissed, barely containing her rage. Despite bracing on the door still, her entire frame was shaking, “You reached into my mind and you pulled that out of me, and you don’t get to sit here and fucking use it. Fuck you,”

Scylla inclined her chin, working her jaw as she apologetically whispered, “I had no idea, Raelle.”

She wasn’t talking about her name anymore, and Raelle knew that. “Why the fuck would you?” she snapped. 

Raelle looked away, then. She couldn’t keep staring into those unwavering blue eyes, so full of understanding and compassion and fucking pity. 

She was being pitied by a terrorist, just fucking great. 

“We’re really not so different, after all,”

It was whispered, but it made Raelle snap her head up. 

Scylla nodded, “We both had our parents taken from us by the military. Mine, by fire. Yours…by fire and by your own conscription…” she got quiet, then, looking away. Contemplative. “For what it’s worth,” she whispered, “I’m sorry I put you through that. I didn’t know.” She looked back, “And I’m sorry about your mother,”

Raelle felt her face crumple. She felt everything inside of her collapse, weeks of emotions that were only half hers, of memories that haunted her, and she finally succumbed to the stress of it all at the soft tone of her enemy. She felt the tears fall and she couldn’t stop them. Her lip trembled and she didn’t bother to hide it. 

She saw her own sadness reflected back at her in those sharp eyes, no longer filled with ice but with understanding. A kindred spirit, and she was a fucking terrorist. 

Just great. 

Raelle laughed quietly, the absurdity of it all not lost on her. She let the tears fall and tried to collect herself. Meal time was almost over. She wouldn’t be able to look like a complete mess after. Everyone would get suspicious. She couldn’t have them asking questions. 

She took a deep breath, and then another, and then another, until the shaking started to subside.

Scylla’s gaze never wavered, filled with a sort of sympathy that came only from knowing what the other was feeling. 

“Yeah,” Raelle murmured quietly, sucking in a breath and forcing herself to look up, to stop any more tears from falling, “Me too.”

\---

It was cathartic. Raelle felt like something in her had been lifted: a weight taken from her shoulders. A burden shared was a burdened halved, and Raelle hated that she shared it with Scylla Ramshorn, but she did, and she had, and she felt lighter for it. It had been cathartic to let it slip out: to give an outlet to all of the confusion she’d been feeling. She managed the rest of her shift a bit like a robot: lost in thought, only going through the motions, until she could leave and traipse back to her barracks, tired and spent but also wired, filled to the brim with a need as ancient as human emotion itself. 

She waited until the shower. She entered her room to find it empty, Clearwater already out on her own shift. She grabbed her stuff and let her lip tremble as she walked, entering an empty stall and turning on the water before allowing the tears to fall, fresh and hard, and allowed herself to feel…everything.

It felt good. It was needed. She needed to cry it out. She’d needed it so badly. 

She hadn’t thought about her mother in…ages. She hadn’t seen her face in her nightmares, and the pain of her passing had dulled with time but had never really disappeared. Seeing her again, like that…it brought it all back.

And Scylla saw something similar every time she shut her eyes. 

It felt…good. It felt wrong. It felt like too much and so she cried until she the water had run cold, the tips of her fingers nothing but wrinkles, and she shivered her entire walk back to her dorm. 

And she slept like a goddamn rock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, Raelle really needed that. Poor bb has really been through it...
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed, thank you for continuing to read and enjoy! ^_^


	13. Common Ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovely readers! Another chapter for you all, we're getting closer to the end. 😬 Don't worry though, like I said, sequel's done. Also, bit of a bonus: it's nearly twice as long. 
> 
> Okay, enough teasing! No notes for this chapter either, hope you enjoy! :)

“Did you…did you see it?”

Raelle looked at Scylla, surprised by how soft the question was. She’d become more soft-spoken, after their confrontation, but these words especially were said with a delicacy that Raelle honestly found surprising. 

“See what?”

Scylla, in an odd display of rendition, didn’t meet Raelle’s eyes, instead staring off to the side, looking at her cell wall.

“Your mom. Did you see-”

“No,” Raelle said, feeling her throat tighten. She swallowed. “I, um. No. She died on a beach, in Liberia. Fighting the Spree.”

“We don’t kill witches,”

“You do if it’s on a battlefield. ‘That’s war, beautiful’,” Raelle parroted, and Scylla slid her gaze to her, narrowing her eyes. Despite that, a small smile played on her lips. 

“So it is,” she said contemplatively. 

“What you saw was…my nightmares. For months. After she died. They only told us she died in a fire. I didn’t see it but my subconscious decided to see it for me,”

“That’s pretty fucked up,”

“Well, shit like that will fuck you up,”

“Touché,” Scylla shook her head. The next part came out as a whisper, pain dancing in her eyes as she quietly proceeded, “I felt them, you know. As a Necro, you feel death. You feel life and you feel its absence. I felt them…I felt when they slipped from this Earth. My mom went before my dad. I still remember the feeling. Like a snake in my hands. Rough but smooth, strong and lithe but skittish. Slid right through my fingers. When they were gone…I felt it. And it left this…void, inside of me. And nothing I’ve done has filled it. If anything, it’s gotten bigger,”

“That doesn’t excuse what you’ve done,”

Scylla looked at her then, with contemplative eyes. “No. It doesn’t,” she said seriously, and that threw Raelle. She hadn’t been expecting that answer. 

“They would hate me, you know. If they knew what I’ve become. What I’ve done. They never liked how the Spree conducted themselves. My parents supported the message but never the methods, and they were never really able to reconcile that for one, they needed the other. But they didn’t see that. They were like the Tarim. Pacifists.”

“Why not try that?”

Scylla looked at Raelle, and sighed, “You think Spree never tried peaceful protest? You think my parents didn’t try to do whatever they could? Nothing ever came of it, in either case.”

“Peaceful protest takes time,” Raelle reasoned, and Scylla rolled her eyes, scoffing slightly.

“How much time do we have, Raelle? How much time do we need? It’s been centuries, and nothing has changed. I never saw anything come of all of my parents’ efforts, except us constantly on the run. Spree clearly didn't see any success either, until they turned to violence. Got them attention. But because my parents sometimes worked side by side with plenty of Spree agents who didn’t commit mass murder, they never understand why others had to, or what the murders were supposed to accomplish,”

“They were supposed to accomplish fear, and they do. We get it. You hate civilians,” Raelle said, with some contempt.

Scylla tilted her head, “I don’t hate civilians. I hate what they represent. I hate what they’re complicit in. I hate that they can’t see that they have the power to change this, and the ones that do see, don’t bother to try. Do you think all civilians agree with the military? No.” She sighed, “I don’t hate them, but I hate what they stand for: my oppression. The end to my life, from the moment I was born. That’s not fair,”

“Life’s not fair,” Raelle shot back.

“But it should be,” Scylla returned, just as quickly, a fire in her eyes, “It should be, and if it isn’t now, I will make it.”

“You can’t,”

“Not alone, no.” Scylla shifted on her bed, turning to fully face Raelle, “Until they see their power, until they see what the Accord truly is – a means to continue an ineffective system – then there will be no change. And the system is ineffective: if Spree can continue mass attacks, how is the military doing the job it swore it would? To protect the people of this nation? To fight their wars on foreign coasts so that they may never see the violence and destruction being wrought? Spree brings that violence right into their homes,”

“You murder innocent people,”

“So do they,” it was said with such conviction that Raelle actually felt the finality to it, Scylla setting her jaw. 

And…she was right. Raelle knew it. She’d always known it. She didn’t agree with what Spree did, but she had never been a fan of the military, either. Especially once it had cost her mother her life. Especially because it would cost Raelle hers, more than likely. And the life of her unit. 

And had done, for all witches, for so long. 

There was truth to what Scylla said, and as much as Raelle didn’t like to admit it…she could no longer try to deny it. And really, she’d always known it, deep down, but what could she have ever really done about it? Nothing. In the end, any act of defiance was met with swift correctional action. Tally and her demerit. Raelle and her time at Cotton Mather, away from her unit, isolated. Sent to teach her about why the military was right, why they did what they did, what they were fighting against. Sent to try to keep her in line. She’d never made much of an effort to hide her distaste for the military, only doing so when she worried about the consequences it could have on her unit. And what had it gotten her? 

A prison sentence, by another name.

“There aren’t any sides to this, not really,” Scylla murmured, “right and wrong is only based on the perceived side that you’re on, when really, it’s all just violence in the end.” Scylla quieted for a moment, pausing. “And if there were sides, you and I would be on the same one,”

Raelle snorted despite herself, “I don’t think so,”

“Don’t you? Don’t we both want the same thing, Raelle Collar? Freedom? Haven’t we both already suffered at the hands of the military institution? At our core, are we not just two damaged witches, who forged very different paths, to reach the same goal?”

Raelle sighed. “It’s not that simple,”

“It is,” Scylla said, seriously. 

“It’s not,”

“It is. You wanted to take them down as much as I did: I felt it. Your anger. Even now, a part of you burns with the desire to get out and never look back. The only difference is that I did something about it, and you did what you could. Fundamentally, we agree on what the future of witch-kind looks like: a life of choice, free from conscription, free from the tyranny of war and all of the destruction we rain unto others. We are on the same side,”

“We’re not,” Raelle shook her head in defiance, “We are not on the same side-”

But she couldn’t think of an argument. They’d had this discussion before: several times, in fact. It always looped back to the fact that, at the end of the day, nether organization had their hands free of blood. That was just a fact, and Raelle wasn’t under any illusions about it. The difference now, was that Scylla knew that about her, whereas before she’d had no concrete proof. 

Raelle fell quiet, contemplative, and Scylla nodded, silently turning back to her meal without another word. 

\---

Raelle knew it was wrong, to feel what she was feeling. She…she understood. She understood where Scylla was coming from. She knew she had a point. She knew that if anyone caught wind of it, she’d be likely imprisoned herself. 

And damn it if a part of her had started not to care. 

She was tired. She was so tired. Everything around her was war and death, terrorists in their cells and terrorists in the barracks. 

She knew that she should report Scylla to her superiors. For what, she wasn’t sure. Conspiracy, probably? Because Raelle wasn’t a goddamn idiot. She knew what Scylla was doing. Trying to break her. Trying to turn her. 

It wasn’t going to work, but the only reason was because Raelle already believed her. Raelle already agreed, however secretly, with how wrong the military was. But what could she do to stop it? Die? That had been her original plan, and living out of spite had been a better one. But now, even on the other side of War College…what hope did she have to bring down an entire institution? 

None. By trying to survive through spite, she had become the very thing she had sought to avoid. She was a soldier now, and she didn’t have a choice in the matter. 

And that wasn’t fair. 

Scylla was right and Raelle had always secretly agreed. She didn’t doubt that many witches thought that Spree had a point. Even Raelle’s own unit had become disillusioned, during their time. Tally especially kept up the façade of being a good little soldier, but Raelle knew she was only waiting for an opportunity, a spark, to try and get recompense for the injustices she had seen during Basic and beyond. Abigail, too, had started to doubt the military by the end of Basic: no easy feat. They’d all come a long way a far as questioning the military, in their own right.

Raelle doubted, still, that they were on her level: not yet. But they were all willing, she had no doubt, to see changes in how the military was run: what it did and why it did it. 

But they were one unit among many, and despite the power of the Bellweather name, at the end of the day, even Bellweathers couldn’t overhaul an entire military. Especially when they were so steeped in its history, like Petra, and unwilling to see beyond it. 

Raelle hated that despite it all…Scylla was right. And they both knew it. There was no point in arguing with her. Indeed, all it had done was remind Raelle of her reasons for disliking the military in the first place. 

She didn’t like, though, how Scylla’s convictions had started to actually weigh on her. She found herself thinking, late at night, about all of the battles, all of the wars, they’d learned about. How many of her own kind had been sent to die, in the name of “national defense”, but where “national defense” turned out to be in the name of annihilation for conquest? How many wars had been started simply because the United States had decided it wanted something, and that others were in the way of that thing? 

And how many witches had been sent into those battles, thinking they were defending the Motherland? How many witches had died for wars over resources, over land? How much blood had they spilled? 

Raelle hated that she hadn’t ever really considered it, and it haunted her. To the point that she started looking into it herself. 

The administration building had a library on the third floor, and, upon entering for the first time, a part of Raelle secretly wondered if she’d even find anything that wasn’t censored, and she didn’t like that that was her first thought. 

She’d studied history, of course. The Mexican War, the Second Mexican War, the Civil War, the World War. She knew in war, no one’s hands were clean. It didn’t take her long to track down the titles she’d read in high school, and then to grab a few more books, for good measure. She sat herself down and read all throughout her first day off of the week, and then her second. 

Yet, all that rereading those history books confirmed, was that everything Scylla had said…was true. 

They’d both been burned by the system. But they’d taken their grief in different directions. Were…if things had been different, if it had been Raelle who had lost her parents, both of them, right in front of her…if it had been her in Scylla’s shoes, running, running…if she was the one carrying that horrible darkness inside of her…their places could have easily been reversed. 

It could have been Raelle in that cell, clenching her jaw and lifting her head to the torture they put her through, refusing to break because _they just didn’t get it_. They just didn’t see how horrible the military was. They were doing what they thought was right.

They all were. 

The thought sent her reeling, and she shut the book she’d been reading, suddenly dizzy. 

And that was really the end of it all, wasn’t it? They were doing what they thought was right. Desperate little creatures fighting for control in a world where they were given none. 

Raelle planted her elbows on the table before her and rubbed her temples. 

This was not good.

\---

She paused on her way out of the library several hours later, and quickly turned back around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's be real, both we and Raelle knew she just needed to shake out the military cobwebs in her head. She's known the whole time Scylla was talking sense, she just didn't want to give her the damn satisfaction. 
> 
> On another note, I actually have no idea if the Spree had peaceful roots/a history rooted in peaceful protest, but maybe they would have given it a shot? I believe that was a theory floating around in the fandom, that it's possible they started peaceful and realized it wasn't working and got progressively more radical (after all, the mass attacks seem to be a newer feature?) My personal head canon is that since they operate mostly as loosely organized but mostly independent cells, some of them may be less violent/dedicated more to systemic change than radical change, like local politics, and others are the more extreme branch. It's all really interesting, at any rate, and I'm sure S2 will delve more into it, now that Scylla is back with Spree.
> 
> And also, oop, Raelle, what are you up to? 👀👀


	14. A Gift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovely readers! Another chapter for you guys, but um...so, do ya'll remember way back in like...Chapter 4 or 5 maybe? When I said that that was the shortest chapter? I lied, this is actually the shortest chapter that somehow snuck through my chapter restructuring. Mostly because, honestly, this chapter really didn't feel right being integrating with any other ones. 
> 
> That said, while I don't have it quite polished yet so can't post them simultaneously, just like in that situation, I'll post the next chapter tomorrow at some point! :) 
> 
> Enjoy!

It wasn’t exactly easy, and if anyone would have asked her why she did it, she wouldn’t have an answer. Maybe it was a feverish moment of weakness. A stupid realization that, were she in Scylla’s shoes, a little kindness could go a long way. Maybe it was just because she was too empathetic. Maybe it was because she still had a death wish, after all. Because if she was caught…if anyone caught on, she was so screwed.

Thank goddess their uniforms were so bulky. Thank goddess that the rapport between everyone changing for their shifts had become so much more casual over the weeks and months of serving their time at Cotton Mather, and no one really noticed Raelle being extra careful about how she changed, shifting far more often than was necessary. 

And thank goddess that, at least for setting up mobile library, there wasn’t a lot of supervision. Raelle offered to do the checklist for the books they put on the cart, and Glory happily agreed, pulling them from the shelf and telling her the titles, Raelle ticking them off and nodding her head to show she’d marked them down. She glanced up as Glory went for another armful before quietly placing her hand on the page and whispering a quick seed, watching, satisfied, as the words shifted. 

Goddess help her if anyone checked the list and saw that there was a new addition. If someone went snooping. If anyone was paying close attention…

She could feel her palms sweating at the thought, but, well…

She didn’t know why she did it. What possessed her to walk right back into that administration building library, roaming the shelves until she found what she’d been looking for. She’d made quick work of the sleeve and whispered a few seeds to disguise the actual book in her hands, and then walked right out with the book tucked into her side, the librarians not even noticing. With any luck, no one would notice for a long while. 

She’d come up with the plan as she’d feverishly walked back to her barracks. As she’d quickly gotten ready for bed and lay awake half the night, thinking of security protocols and how she could possibly get around them. 

It was reckless and stupid and it would probably get her killed, and she was doing it for a goddamn terrorist, but Raelle couldn’t stop herself. Hatred was a strong drug, and the only thing that Raelle knew to be stronger, was compassion. She had that connection, now, with Scylla. She may as well use it. Maybe it would lead to something. Maybe it would be enough to make Scylla start to question herself, too. Connections, after all, were a two-way street, and wanted or not…she had one now. 

She kept her secret close. She’d written up a list of imperfections that she created herself among the pages (to make it all the more convincing), and slipped it into the book, and slipped the book under her uniform, where she had kept it ever since.

Glory didn’t know. If anything, that was one consolation: should anything go sideways, Glory wouldn’t get in trouble. Or so Raelle hoped, at least.

They took the loaded cart and headed back into Red, singing their seeds to enter and then walking through the security doors and onto the other end, where the other guards awaited them, and they started their mobile library/social hour rounds.

Technically, Scylla’s book privileges had been revoked. But Raelle knew that rule had been quietly repealed at her behest, after Scylla hadn’t caused trouble for nearly a full month. And thank goddess for that, because Raelle would have no way of executing her plan if they’d kept up the punishment. 

“Scy-” Raelle caught herself as she banged on the door. She coughed and corrected, “Uh, Thirteen! Mobile library,”

“…Clear,”

Raelle threw open the window, looking in to see Scylla stood where she was supposed to be, in the middle of the room. Her bruises were almost entirely healed, though the eye still wasn’t completely back to normal. 

“I don’t have a book to give you, I was under the impression I wasn’t allowed mobile library anymore,” she said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

“Punishment ended yesterday, zero-hundred hours,”

Another eyebrow, “You say that as though I have any idea what time it is,”

It struck Raelle then, that no, Scylla wouldn’t have any way of knowing that little fact. Raelle herself had random overnight, mid-day, and early morning shifts in Red. It was all done on purpose. 

Raelle shrugged, “Point is, punishment’s over. I have a book for you, if you’d like it,”

That got a genuine response from Scylla: surprise. She hastened to cover it, and Raelle marveled, really, at how quickly she reined in her emotions. 

“Oh?” she asked, nearly sounding skeptical. 

“Yeah, if you’re still good with me choosing them for you. I um…I think you’ll like it, though,”

Scylla eyed her for a moment, and Raelle relished in, for once, the shoe being on the other foot. She’d gotten the drop on Scylla this time, which seemed to simultaneously intrigue and unnerve Scylla, though she kept her features (mostly) neutral.

“I guess?” she said finally. 

Raelle nodded and popped open the book slot, sliding her contraband through. 

Scylla stepped forward cautiously, her curious gaze set on Raelle, who tried not to blink. To maintain eye contact. To show Scylla she wasn’t playing with her. 

They’d passed that, and there was no way of going back to it. There was no way of pretending that she didn’t think Scylla had a point. There was no point in pretending she would ever be okay with being military. No point in pretending she would ever forget how much pain and suffering had been had, on all sides. 

Maybe handing a terrorist an olive branch was a stupid idea. But it was a way to show that she understood. She didn’t like it, but she understood. She saw Scylla, truly. 

It had always been Raelle’s greatest asset: empathy. It drove her to do everything she’d ever done, rash and reckless as it may be. This was clearly no exception. 

Scylla reached forward cautiously and took the book, her eyes never leaving Raelle’s until she’d stepped far enough away from the cell door. She finally turned her curious gaze to the book held in her hand, and her eyebrows shot up in surprise.

Raelle couldn’t help the small smile that she hid behind the cell door as Scylla looked at her, shock on her face. 

“You-”

“Enjoy it, Scyl,” she said, nodding slightly as she saw tears well in those piercing blue eyes. 

She shut the window gently, smiling to herself as she made her way back to the cart, the list of imperfections in her hand. She glanced around to make sure the others were occupied, and quickly opened the ledger to slip the paper labeled “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” into the sleeve for Detainee Thirteen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn Scylla did NOT see that coming. Turns out our lil' Necro isn't the only one who can pull off a surprise. She's been asking for that book for so long...
> 
> Anyway, like I said, I know it's a short one but honestly this felt best as a stand-alone chapter. But you guys have been a wonderful audience, so I'll get the next chapter up tomorrow at some point. :)


	15. Risk & Reward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well hello again! As promised, the next chapter for you guys, a fair bit longer but yeah, the last one really works best as a stand-alone. If you're just getting to the fic now and didn't see yesterday's update, make sure to read that first or you may be a little confused!
> 
> No notes or things of importance for this chapter, enjoy!

“Why did you do that?” Scylla asked (demanded, really,) when Raelle saw her again, on her second to last day of Red. 

Raelle tilted her head at the question. “Do what?”

Scylla held up the book in her hands. “This,”

“Oh,” Raelle shrugged, “You requested it. Seemed like you should have it, I guess.”

“Raelle,” Scylla started, sounding almost…frustrated, “I’ve been asking for this book since I got here. I have asked well over fifty guards for this. I’ve asked well over ten lieutenants. I know that my requests never left this goddess-forsaken hall. I know they don’t choose nor allow new books. There’s no way your superiors-”

“Who said my superiors know about it?” Raelle asked, trying to keep her tone casual. Scylla didn’t need to know that she was still a little nervous, but really…it’d been a full four days and no one had picked up on the sudden addition to the list. 

Scylla’s eyes widened almost comically, and her mouth fell open into a gape. “That’s-” she paused, shaking her head, “If they find out-”

“If they find out, that’s not on you,” Raelle said simply. “I won’t tell if you won’t,”

Scylla tilted her head, confusion still plainly written on her features. 

Finally, resigned, she seemed to relax, her shoulders slumping as she shook her head, “Why did you do that?”

“Because maybe we’re not on the same side, Scylla. But in your shoes, I’d want to read a new fucking book every once in a while,” Raelle said. It wasn’t the whole truth: she didn’t dare speak the whole truth. But it was true enough. “You may not deserve it for what you’ve done, but you’re still here, and you’re still human,”

“Most see me as a monster,” she said skeptically.

Raelle nodded. “You are. But monsters can be human, too,”

“Most are,” Scylla said quietly, and Raelle acquiesced. 

“Most are,”

“Well, I, um…I appreciate it. I know there is a chance we may see each other tomorrow, but I believe you’re near the end of your rotation, no?

“I am,” Raelle said plainly, not willing to wonder as to how Scylla might have guessed that. 

Scylla bit her lip and nodded, contemplative. She looked away from Raelle, squinting at the book in her hands as though it had all of her answers. 

“Right, I don’t know when they’ll come back with another mobile library, so I’ll give this to you now,” she stepped forward.

“Did you read it?”

Scylla paused, “I’ve read this book, cover to cover, more times than I can count. Pity about the author, but it still holds…a special place, for me,” she sighed quietly, “It was my parents’ favorite book to read to me when I was a kid. They read it to me because it had someone else like me in it. When you’re dodgers, you stay with whoever you can. You sleep in places like cupboards under the stairs. You don’t see your own kind practicing any work, because they’re too afraid that they’ll be found out. Sometimes, you forget you’re a witch entirely. You lose yourself entirely,” she turned the book over in her hands, “Eventually, they stopped reading me bedtime stories, so I just read it when I couldn’t sleep. So, yes. To answer your question,” she fixed Raelle with an unnervingly powerful stare, a stare so full, so leaden with…something, that it nearly took Raelle’s breath away, “I did read it,”

She stepped forward, up to the door, and pushed it through the slot.

“Thank you,” she said, in a voice so quiet, and so broken, that Raelle looked up from the slot to her eyes immediately. “You didn’t have to do that,”

“You would have done the same,” Raelle said, even if she didn’t know that, and by the looks of it, Scylla didn’t know it, either. 

Raelle reached down to take the book, but Scylla spoke again. 

“Don’t, um,” she swallowed. For the first time, perhaps ever, Raelle saw that Scylla – Detainee Thirteen, Sixteen-hundred herself – was nervous. 

It was such an odd look on her, and it struck Raelle just how…small, it made her seem. How human. 

“Don’t check this one. It won’t pass inspection. Page fifty-five is a duplicate. If you want to keep this up…take it and give it to your superior, or whoever handles the schedule. If not…I understand. It’s been a pleasure either way, Raelle Collar. Genuinely,” and sincerity shone in her eyes and Raelle looked her, skeptical. 

Scylla released her hold on the book and stepped back. 

Raelle glanced down at the book, her hand hovering over it. 

She should check it. It was mandatory protocol. It was entirely possible that Scylla was lying about what she’d placed in it. Maybe it was indeed only a copy of page fifty-five, but maybe it was something else. Anything else. But if Scylla’s collar actually was working properly…then it was truly a feat if she could do anything larger than, maybe, some kind of page manipulation. 

Still, Scylla was Spree, and Spree had been known to do more, with less. And on top of that, Scylla was asking for trust that they hadn’t built yet. Scylla was asking her to break more rules than Raelle had already broken. Scylla was asking for something that Raelle wasn’t sure if she could give. 

Did she want to see Scylla again? Truthfully, she was approaching four months and change at Cotton Mather. She was still scheduled for two week intervals on another full rotation of the wings and Kitchen, but that brought her to Orange for her last weeks. She wouldn’t serve another term in Red. 

She could be done with this, and that hit her, hard. She could be done with Scylla. With her weird questions and her dark humor and her alluring presence. With her darkness and pain. With all of her treacherous and cunning talks and her sharp tongue, with…everything. 

Raelle stared at the book, suddenly much more important than it had been before. 

She glanced up at Scylla, who was looking at her plainly, with sparks of curiosity and…affection, almost. As though truly, she had some sort of fondness for Raelle.

That didn’t sit well with her, so Raelle looked away. She could completely ignore Scylla, scan it, and report it for magic. Scylla would be taken away, for sure. Likely interrogated. Maybe they would hold her in Oyer for weeks. Try to break her even more than they already had, and when she didn’t give in, or even if she did, then quite possibly she could be shipped off to somewhere even more top-secret to be executed: likely what happened to all prisoners who had served their purpose.

Would she survive her time in Oyer?

Would they execute her quickly, or sentence her to burn, like her parents?

Did Raelle care?

A beat, and she closed the distance between the book and her hand, accepting it and closing the book slot with a click. She turned away from Scylla and her cell before she could second-guess herself. Before she could look up and see the expression on Scylla’s face. It could have been her usual contemplative amusement, or that odd fondness, or surprise…it could have been so many things, and Raelle tried not to think of what she was risking by taking this terrorist at her word.

\---

Raelle didn’t let the book out of her sight. She tucked it on the bottom of the cart, hiding it away until she could open it for double-checking back in the Terminer library. Glory busied herself going over the few books that had been exchanged, a large haul for Red. Raelle quietly flipped open Harry Potter, to page fifty-five, as instructed, and sure enough: there were two. She pulled out the duplicate, careful to make sure that Glory didn’t see, before folding it and pocketing it. 

\---

She didn’t use it for very nearly three weeks. Her rotations had been somewhat shaken by her involvement in Scylla’s interrogation, so she and Glory were assigned to Kitchen for a week before they were supposed to rotate into Gray.

She found that she couldn’t even enjoy Kitchen though, entirely too absorbed in the folded page from Harry Potter that she’d stashed away, well and truly hidden, in her barracks. 

As far as she could tell…it was just a literal, physical copy of page fifty-five. But when she whispered a seed, it was definitely a piece of work…to do what, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if she should do what Scylla said and hand it to a superior. For all she knew, that piece of paper would be capable of poisoning, exploding, or possibly cutting or maiming whoever handled it that wasn’t Raelle. For all she knew, that piece of paper was a weapon, a ticking time bomb, and she had it tacked behind one of the postcards she hung up in her barracks. 

But time went by and nothing happened with it. She would pull it out while Clearwater slept, reading the page, over and over, flipping it in her hands, unsure. 

In the end, it was the monotony of Gray, and the temptation of their tenuous connection, that drove her to hand the page over to Graves.

Who took one glance at it, nodded, and said, “Okay, dismissed,”

Raelle was genuinely shocked to find that, upon her return to her barracks, a new schedule was posted to her door. And that new schedule was reflected in the locker room when she reported for duty the next day, too. She and Glory had been accelerated: one more week in Gray, one week in Yellow, one week in Orange, one in Red, and so it went until she was scheduled to leave Cotton Mather. They were no longer assigned Kitchen duty at all.

And no one questioned that. Not even Glory, who seemed surprised by the sudden change, but didn’t say anything about it. 

The goddamn structure of the military dictated that things like that not be questioned. And Scylla knew that, and had taken full advantage of it.

It would have made Raelle laugh, if she wasn’t so concerned about how easy it had been for Scylla to so quickly and flawlessly manipulate the system like that. If she wasn’t so concerned about how Scylla had been able to even create such a page. Just how powerful…was she? 

Raelle found she didn’t want to know. 

The new schedule meant she would be in Red Wing twice more before she left, and the thought made her nervous. More than she probably needed to be, but it also felt fairly warranted. She didn’t know what was left to speak about between the two of them, but clearly, Scylla wanted more. And if she could do it…if she could get into Scylla’s head? Metaphorically speaking. If she could reach her? 

Maybe it would be worth it.

\---

“I apologize that I couldn’t make it more often,” were the first words, spoken softly as Raelle handed Scylla her meal. “But I’ve noticed that frequent rotations in Red are often red-flags for people on their first go through.”

Raelle shrugged, “I’m surprised you were able to make it at all,” she said, seriously. “How did you do that?”

Scylla smirked, tapping her nose, “Now now, Private Collar. Can’t have you knowing all of my secrets, can I?”

“Do they know you can do that?”

“No,” Scylla said with a shrug, “It was a risk to even break the cuffs when I did. I don’t make a habit out of showing my hand very often,”

“How did you know I wouldn’t report you?”

Scylla tilted her head, “I didn’t,” she said, sincere. “I hoped, but I didn’t know,”

“You really think you’ve broken through with me, don’t you?” Raelle asked, squinting. 

Scylla smiled, “Honestly? I’m not so sure,” she looked down at her tray and picked at her food. “I thought so. But you…you continue to surprise me, Raelle.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Raelle deadpanned, and Scylla laughed. 

“I think you and I are playing a game of cat and mouse, and neither of us are going to win, if I can speak frankly. I suppose, I’ll tell you what I told Anacostia - I don’t know if you remember, but besides Alder, she was my most frequent interrogator at Fort Salem. Very gentle, compared to others. She really spent most of her time staring at me, and I, at her. We had several pleasant discussions. Just like you and I,” she pursed her lips, “I think we both left that cell a little different than when we entered it. Not unlike you and I,”

“No?”

“No,” Scylla nodded to herself, “I’m not an idiot, Raelle. I don’t think you’re here just out of the kindness of your heart, though I am curious as to why you did decide to trust me,” she tilted her head, appraising, before she continued, “We both have an agenda, at the end of the day. We’re standing on opposite sides of a line drawn in the sand. Just because we can see each other clearer, doesn’t mean either of us is willing to step over it,”

Raelle shrugged, “I don’t know why I did it,” she said honestly, finally answering Scylla's implied question. She had some reasons, but none of them were the entire reason why she’d decided to trust Scylla. 

“I think you realize the same thing Anacostia did. That none of this is as black and white as we want it to be. That we’re all just shades of grey. That in matters of war, there is no right or wrong: only the side that you’re on, and what you’re willing to do for that side. At the end of the day, we can justify our actions until we’re blue in the face, but it will never ring true to others until they’ve walked a mile in our shoes. And you and I? We’ve done that,”

“So we see each other,”

Scylla nodded, “We do,”

“I would never do what you did,” Raelle said, but it wasn’t a challenge. Not like before. Now it was just a statement, and as such, received a nod of agreement from Scylla.

“No, I don’t think you would,” she admitted. She fiddled with her tray for a moment.

“I do know why you did it, though,”

Scylla nodded, “And just like that, the monster became human,”

Raelle shrugged, “Same thing,” which got a laugh from Scylla. 

“But you don’t believe what the military tells you, either,” again, a statement. As though they were old acquaintances, rehashing old events or discussing the weather.

“No. I can’t just take them at face value. They’ve lied so much, about everything,”

Scylla nodded, still fidgeting, “So have Spree,”

“No clean hands in this one,”

Scylla smiled at her, an uneasy smile. “Mine especially,”

Raelle nodded, because it was true. “Yours especially,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aawww, look at these two! They've come such a long way (man, I warned you guys it was gonna be a slow burn lmao).
> 
> Also, on an unrelated note, to be 100% honest, it's been years since I've read HP, I chose page fifty-five randomly with no intention of it having any significance or anything. Out of curiosity I dug out my Harry Potter books not too long ago and checked page fifty-five in my versions of the books (since they have so many editions now) and holy hell it's the part where Hagrid tells Harry about how Voldemort killed his parents?! So anyway, happy accidental parallels lmao.


	16. Dawning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovely readers! Y'all are in so much luck, I originally wasn't going to get this out until tomorrow but things got shifted and now I have plans to just...fall off the grid for a few days and I didn't want to leave you hanging, so you get this now! Pretty much the whole fic has been building to this chapter: they're very nearly on the same page and we love to see it. 
> 
> This is also the longest chapter of the fic ahahaha so I hope it'll hold you lot over until Saturday, when I can update again!
> 
> No warnings, same ol' same ol', let's get into the chapter!

“Can you get to outside of my cell? Around 4:05am?”

The question made Raelle hesitate, startled. Scylla looked at her with a kind of…urgency, that Raelle hadn’t really seen on her before. 

“You mean here? In front of your cell, here?” she asked, and Scylla rolled her eyes. 

“No, not here. Outside of it. I know the entire compound is set up like a five-pointed star. I’m set up at the eastern point. Can you be outside at 4:05am?”

Raelle blinked, shocked. “How-”

Scylla huffed, “I don’t have time to explain, not now. I know this is your last shift here this week. You get two days off between rotations, no? Can you make it the day after tomorrow?” there was a hushed urgency to her voice that raised alarm bells in Raelle. 

What was this? Why the sudden urgency, why-

Scylla made a distressed noise and came right up to the door, her meal cast aside on her bed, “We don’t have a lot of privacy here, Raelle. I just want to speak with you,”

“We are speaking,”

Scylla shook her head, “No, we’re not. We’re talking, but we’re always under scrutiny, never speaking at length, always in challenges and riddles and always interrupted before we can get anywhere: before we can properly talk. I think we deserve a little more time. Can you make it?”

“I mean, what about guard duty?”

Scylla rolled her eyes “External guard duty is far less frequent than internal. They come by every hour, on the hour. They are usually delayed for 5am rounds because that’s when they’re trading shifts: it takes a while,” she huffed. “Some get distracted at northeast, where they change post: sunrise and all. Some don’t. Can. You. Make. It?”

“I guess-”

Scylla nodded curtly, “Good. Twenty feet to the left of the point, five hands up from the ground. It’ll keep you hidden. Put your left hand there when you arrive. Remember: 04:05,”

Raelle’s head was spinning from all of the instructions, “But how will you know the ti-” Raelle hissed and Scylla shushed her. 

“Just be there, Raelle,”

\---

4:05am was cold. Raelle shivered as she walked, heading onto the grounds for Terminer.

Scylla wasn’t wrong. Terminer camp was fashioned into a five-pointed star, with fencing between tips that had seen better days: it was obvious that it wasn’t kept up at all from the giant hole Raelle found awaiting her at the eastern point. Apparently, the lack of escapes had put the fence at the bottom of the military budget, and Raelle couldn’t say she blamed them. It wasn’t like the prisoners had anywhere to go except off the edge of a cliff or into a firing squad of highly-trained military officers. 

The world was still dark, and Raelle stifled a yawn as she slid into the hole in the fence and sighed to herself. 

What had Scylla said? 

Twenty feet to the left…

She did as instructed, before kneeling.

Five hands up from the ground. 

Raelle sighed but also counted using her hands until she got to the spot. She placed her palm flat on the cool concrete and immediately felt a sharp tingling. Startled, she pulled away from the wall and turned her palm towards herself. To her surprise, a faint, pulsing squiggle had started to appear, and was quickly fading before her eyes. 

She stared as it completely faded, and with it, the feeling, and it clicked: Scylla had done that. In the interrogation. She’d never even noticed, just that sensation after the fact. 

And apparently, no one else had noticed, either. 

She stared at her hand, the pulsing waning. What…what _was_ that? What was happening? Did she dare do it again? 

She stared as though her palm would give her the answer, which of course, it didn’t. 

It was…witchcraft. There was no other way to describe it, it-

It burned, suddenly and sharply, the S coming into focus, red swelling contrasting the paleness of the rest of her palm. Raelle hissed in pain, surprised as it continued pulsing to her heartbeat. Perhaps stupidly, she put her palm back on the wall. She didn’t know what else to do, and the coolness of the concrete helped with the pulsing.

“Raelle?” a quiet voice asked, unsure. 

Raelle felt her jaw drop. “Scylla?!” she asked, before realizing she probably said it too loudly. She clapped a hand over her mouth and heard a chuckle. “I…can you…can you hear me?” Raelle asked, shocked. 

“I can see you, too. But you can’t see me. Your palm is in the wrong spot. Move it a hair to the left. Don’t lift your hand, though!” Scylla instructed quickly, literally as Raelle started to lift her palm. “This isn’t exactly easy to do and the more you break the connection, the harder it will be to reestablish it,”

“What…” Raelle asked, moving her palm along the wall, to the left as instructed. She gasped as the concrete started to fade as she slid it, fading, fading, until she could see, vaguely, inside of a brightly lit cell on the other side of the wall. “What…is this?” she asked, in awe, catching sight of Scylla.

She was sat, legs crossed like a pretzel, facing the wall, her own hand on it, very nearly aligned with Raelle’s. Raelle moved hers over to where Scylla’s was, and the wall nearly looked dissolved. Were it not for the large space between their palms…well. Raelle gaped. 

Scylla smiled mischievously. “The palm is just a little something I cooked up a little while ago, while still at Fort Salem. I never did get to try it. I’m happy my first time was a success: this would have been much harder without it. The wall is…well. We’ll keep that one between us, but it’s another little secret,”

“How…how can you do that?” Raelle asked, awed. 

Scylla gave a half-shrug and it dawned on Raelle almost immediately.

“Is this how you know what time it is?!” she asked, shocked. “You’ve known this whole time-”

Scylla nodded. “I have a tendency to purposefully not let that one slip, though. Much easier to pretend I don’t know what time it is, for the most part. It’s also how I know the guard rotations. Surprised you didn’t catch onto that one sooner, Private Collar,” she smirked. 

Raelle rolled her eyes, “You didn’t give me a whole hell of a lot of time to process,”

“I’m not going to apologize for that,”

“Touché,” Ralle murmured, looking away from their conversation in awe. The farther away she looked from their apparently magically connected hands, the less faded the wall became until, just a little above and around her, it was solid concrete. 

Absolutely astounding. 

“How did you do this? I didn’t know that this could be done with voiceless work,” she wondered aloud.

“It’s not voiceless,”

Raelle snapped her gaze to Scylla, feeling her mouth drop open in shock, “What?!”

Scylla grimaced. “It’s not voiceless. Once the connection is created, it can be done voicelessly,” she nodded at Raelle’s own palm, “But only in that I can activate the connection. Otherwise, all of this: the transparency, making the mark, forging the connection: none of that was voiceless. I had to use a seed to get this to work, too. I actually learned it in Basic, but I don’t think they intended it for this purpose. But, well, when you have the time like I do…”

“You can do seeds? But-” Raelle felt not unlike a fish, her mouth gaping as she tried to put together how all of this was possible.

Scylla smiled sadly at her, and sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” she looked away, running her other hand that wasn’t on the wall through her hair. “The collars they’ve been using for me, they’re…well. They’re not necessarily…effective,”

“What?!” Raelle hissed, shocked. 

Scylla flinched, “They still work. I can’t do near what I can normally do without one on. But they’re tampered with. Just enough to allow me to do things like this. Just enough for little things, like fixing for after interrogations and like your schedule-”

Raelle raised her eyebrows. That was what Scylla considered “little”?! That “little” piece of trickery had to work seamlessly with the magic already imbued into the entire military system. It had to flawlessly slot into an already established network of magic, had to recognize who was handling the page to dissolve the glamour, had to then transfer itself to new schedule paper, and all that meant…

Raelle shivered. The implications for that were too great. 

“And the cuffs…” Raelle realized, interrupting whatever it was that Scylla had been about to say.

She nodded, “And the cuffs, though I can do those almost seedlessly, now. I don’t usually take so many…risks. But you were worth it,” she said, looking at Raelle with a look that both made her skin crawl, and a blush rise on her cheeks. 

“So, wait,” Raelle shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts, “If you…if your collar…but they checked it! They checked it for tampering, after the cuffs, they-they test, we test, for traces of work-”

Scylla rolled her eyes, “You check on the doors in the cells and the books we hand back, and that’s pretty much it because you expect the collars to stop us from doing anything else. You almost never check the walls, and even if you did. This fades. All magical signatures below a certain register do,”

“Sub-frequencies,”

Scylla smiled at the fact that Raelle had figured it out, “Yes, sub-frequencies. A specialty of Necros. And a frequency that these collars can protect against, but also the hardest thing to check them for. I can’t sing a seed above a sub-register, but it has been touched up just enough…that the changes aren’t evident. Unless you know where to look. And no one ever does.”

“So you…you could have gotten out of here, at any time. You could have just…up and left, whenever?”

Scylla chuckled. “No, alas. I can do some things but this collar still prevents me from performing the work that would be required for a prison break. Especially here: I don't exactly have anywhere to go, even if I actually could manage to escape Terminer. Plus, I have my orders, Raelle. Same as you.”

And if that didn’t just hit Raelle like a ton of bricks, her stomach sinking, mouth going dry.

Just who the fuck was this woman? 

“So you’re still Spree then?”

Scylla smiled wryly, “No. Spree abandoned me as soon as they got wind that the military had me. I knew they would: they made no qualms about telling me that if that were to happen, I would be dead to them. I honestly didn’t think I would ever fail, but I did, so I suppose I can’t blame them. I would be a liability. But just because I’m without a faction, doesn’t mean I’m without allies,” she tilted her head, “Like I said, Raelle. There are no sides to this. Not really,”

Raelle shook her head, a realization hitting her. If Scylla’s collars were being tampered with, and they were military property, then it stood to reason… “And one of your allies is military,”

Scylla nodded, “Yes. I can’t tell you anything else, but why do you think I never broke, in interrogation? There is far too much at stake. Spree never told me anything important, anyway. The military got all they needed from me in my first interrogation. They thought, because of the size of the attack, that I was a higher up. But we both know: higher ups don’t get their hands dirty in war. They send others to do it for them,”

“And you did,” Raelle deadpanned. 

Scylla nodded, pulling her knees to her chest. “So I did,”

They sat there in silence, observing each other for a moment. 

“Sometimes I regret it, you know?” Scylla whispered, looking at the floor of her cell. Raelle realized that it looked…smaller, from this angle. “Sixteen-hundred is a lot of people. I felt them. I tried not to let it get to me…but it did. I felt every. Single. One. I know that it doesn’t…excuse it. I know that me regretting it doesn’t bring them back. And I know that, if given another chance, even knowing what I know…I would probably do it again.”

“That’s not how regret works,” Raelle pointed out, and Scylla rolled her eyes. 

“I can’t tell you why I would. Some part of me still sees it as something that had to happen,”

Raelle scoffed.

Scylla tilted her head. “I know it doesn’t…seem like such violence is ever justified. But have you ever wondered, Raelle, why Spree chose that day for such a big attack? Conscription Day?” Scylla sighed, “I think a lot of people missed the point of it. How they were about to condemn thousands to the same fate I was.”

Raelle’s reaction was vehement and immediate, her head shaking while the words started to work through her “That’s not the same,” she said, automatic.

“Why?” Scylla asked, serious. “Because it doesn’t happen all at once, in the Army? Because you can spread those deaths out over weeks or months, or even years or decades? Because sixteen-hundred cadets don’t just die immediately when they’re reaped for the sowing? Because sixteen-hundred innocent people weren’t sentenced to death the moment they were called to serve their country? Suddenly, because it’s all at once, and because it’s people who haven’t done anything but exist…suddenly, because it’s not the US Military, it’s a monstrous act?”

Raelle fell silent, the implications of Scylla’s words washing over her.

“I…” she stopped, startled, “It’s just…sixteen-hundred people is so many…”

“Exactly,” Scylla whispered. 

It hit Raelle, then, and she felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. It was a macabre statement, a terrible one, grim in its implications. An eye for an eye, in the saddest, most twisted way possible.

Raelle worked her jaw, trying to fight the sudden feeling that she was drowning. It felt like she literally couldn’t breathe. It didn’t excuse the actions, it didn’t justify their means, it didn’t-

“My dad could have been one of those civilians,” Raelle struggled. 

Scylla nodded, and some contempt sparked in her eyes, “And your mother was one of those who died for ‘the cause’. If he had also been a witch, he would have probably met the same fate,”

“That’s not true,” Raelle snapped, and Scylla sent her a sad smile.

“Isn’t it? How many bloodlines have you seen come down to one child, and that child gets sent out to fight in battles they’ll never come back from? How many witch bloodlines are being slowly, but systematically, destroyed?”

“The military makes exceptions-”

Scylla rolled her eyes, “To replenish the bloodline, yeah. Just to send those children out to meet the same fate as their foremothers. In the end, the Camarilla and those who hated us – those who still hate us – still win, even if it was a few hundred years in the making. Our annihilation is all but guaranteed,”

“That doesn’t excuse-”

“It’s not an excuse, Raelle!” Scylla said with some frustration, deathly serious but looking genuinely sorry about it, “Nothing excuses killing that many people. I’ve accepted that. I’ve accepted that I’m being punished for an atrocious act that I committed, no matter how justified my intentions felt at the time. Funny thing about prison: you have a lot of time to reflect on these things. But at the end of the day, I would do it again because there is no right side in war: if I am to commit such acts, I have to do so for a cause I believe in. Spree are the mirror that forces civilians to see the deaths their silence causes. To force them to consider what they demand of us. And they don’t care, so we continue until they do,”

“That’s fucked up,” Raelle said. She said it with as much venom as she could muster, but her voice broke. 

Because it was true: that was fucked up. But it wasn’t just that…it was all fucked up. She didn’t have the numbers off the top of her head, but Raelle knew that a bit over a thousand witches were recruited every year to the military. If Spree were killing en masse to show just how many people it was that would die in coming wars…to showcase how many people were sentenced to death in mandatory conscription…

It was an eye for an eye, but it was…disgusting. It disgusted even herself, how desensitized she was to the violence of the military. To how many soldiers they lost in any given conflict, and how many of them had had a choice to be there?

None. Not a damn one of them. Herself included. Her mother. Scylla. Every guard in that compound. 

She felt her hands start to shake, and pressed her palm harder into the wall, curling her other hand into a tightly-balled fist.

It didn’t…it didn’t make mass murder right. But Scylla was right in that, why did it suddenly matter less if it happened over time? And why did it matter less that they were innocent? Raelle had been eight-fucking-teen when she’d been forced to join. Was she not innocent, as well?

It all had her reeling, and she didn’t like it, not at all. She’d never liked the military, but this realization…made her ill. So many innocent lives, on both sides…sacrificed to make a point. 

Scylla scooted closer to the wall, as though sensing Raelle’s inner turmoil. At the very least, she had the decency to look sympathetic about it. “I was wrong,” Scylla whispered, “For what it’s worth: I was wrong about you and I. We’re not the same. You’re a good person, Raelle,” she said it with such a serious tone that Raelle felt her ears burn. “And that’s what makes you, you. You find the loss of life inexcusable, and I…I can’t see it that way. If someone attacks me, I am allowed to defend myself. To hurt them back,”

“It’s just so wasteful,” Raelle whispered, looking away to blink back sudden tears.

“That’s war, beautiful,” Scylla echoed. She huffed out a breath through her nose. “I’ve accepted my punishment, you know? I know I deserve this. I’m under no illusions about any of this,”

Raelle sucked in a breath, before quietly agreeing: “That makes two of us, I think.”

“I don’t think any years served in prison can make up for what I’ve done. But I want…I need to believe, that it will all be worth it in the end. That my choices…that it all means something. Because if not, and I’ve done all this for nothing…killed en masse, survived interrogations and torture, served years in prison…and probably many more…”

“Why not cooperate?” Raelle found herself asking, despite it all. 

Fuck it, they were being candid, right? 

Scylla snorted, “Do you think I was calling the shots? Like I said: Spree didn’t tell me anything. They never did. Despite trusting me for the mall, they didn’t trust me. Not really. I see it, now. They used me for their own ends, but I still agree with those ends, so I can’t fault them for it. Spree is just a bunch of cells, small satellite groups working independently of each other. I don’t even know where my cell was based, or who was in it. I visited a base in Vermont for the balloon,” Scylla shook her head, “I have no information to give the Army, regarding Spree. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want to cooperate,”

“Why not?”

“Because comfort is complacency. I can’t lose sight of what I’m fighting for, Raelle, nor why I’ve done what I’ve done. Otherwise, I really am a terrorist, aren’t I? I can’t allow myself to fall into the trap of a cushy prison existence. My chains can’t be invisible,” she said with conviction. 

Raelle stared for a moment, but nodded.

She understood. She really did. A part of her still hated it, but at the end of the day…the woman before her was human. She had done terrible things, and she would do more, were she not in prison. Of that, Raelle had little doubt. But she understood. 

If given half a chance, Raelle wondered if she would take someone up on their offer: if they told her, in hushed whispers in the shadows, that they were working towards taking down the military…would she join? Would she listen? Fall in line? 

She doubted it, but she would be interested. She could be swayed. She understood how someone became Scylla Ramshorn. Truly, she did. 

“I admire your conviction,” she said, honestly. “But I question your methods,”

“Good,”

They fell into another silence, Scylla glancing beyond Raelle toward the lightening sky beyond her. 

“You’ll have to go, soon. I…thank you,”

“For what?” Raelle furrowed her brow.

“For this. You didn’t have to trust me. Especially after what I did to you, and especially because of all that we are: because of the opposite sides that we’re supposedly on. And yet, you’re here,”

“Same as you,” Raelle whispered. 

The corner of Scylla’s lip ticked up. 

“Not quite.” She acquiesced. 

“No, not quite,” Raelle acknowledged the obvious wall between them. 

“The sunrise is beautiful this time of day. I’ve gotten very good at counting minutes. You should have fifteen, to head to the cliffs. It’s where most guards go before their rotations, if they can’t sleep. It wouldn’t be unusual for them to spot you heading that way if you can make it back to the perimeter fence. Honesty, at this hour, they shouldn’t even see you. It should be Mare and Wald today, they tend to linger at opening post. You should leave soon, though, otherwise it’s far more likely you’ll be caught,”

Raelle nodded her understanding. She couldn’t say why, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to move from her spot, rooted to the ground by the sudden weight on her shoulders. She felt exhausted.

Scylla smiled. And it was, Raelle realized, a genuine smile. “See you in a few weeks, Raelle,” and she pulled her hand from the wall, severing their connection. Raelle watched Scylla fade as the wall came slowly back into focus: until there was nothing before her but cold, grey concrete. 

She pulled her palm away from the wall, the searing pain returning for only a moment before it dulled, pulsing. She stood from where she’d ended up sitting on the ground, dusted herself off, and headed for the East Cliffs. The perimeter fence cut off at the cliffs, so she would be better off sneaking to the other side that way, rather than try to enter the same way she’d come. 

She had known it was a popular spot for sunrise viewing: Clearwater sometimes had overnight external guard rotation, and she would always be late getting back to barracks because of stopping to watch the sunrise. Raelle also knew that Glory frequented the spot, but she found herself hoping that no one would be there that she knew. She didn’t need the questions.

She needed a moment to just…digest it all. She made her way over the rocks, finding one that was flat and far enough away from the edge to not incite her vertigo, and quickly swung around to the other side of the perimeter fence. Sure enough, there were others there, spread out, as the first rays of sunlight started to breach the horizon, and thankfully, none noticed her sudden arrival as she approached.

Raelle sucked in the fresh air of the early morning and closed her eyes, letting the light permeate her eyelids as she leaned back and, for just a moment…let herself just be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scylla really be out here being all mysterious even after revealing like...probably way more than she should have. Clearly she trusts Raelle, eh? Also, sneaky lil Necro giving Raelle that palm DM in the middle of a chaotic interrogation. She works quick. I know that in canon the palm DM doesn't actually seem to hurt Raelle, but as, in this fic, Scylla did it in haste and also in a very high-stress environment, to me it made sense for it to come with pain (for now). 
> 
> I also hear all of you for wanting longer chapters in general, so I've structured the sequel's chapters to be about as long as this one is, give or take (all chapters will be over 3,000 words, at any rate). Hope that'll work for ya! :) Anyway, drop a line if you liked it, and see ya in a few days for Chapter 17! Damn we are almost done with this fic... :O


	17. Goodbyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovelies! I've returned from being unplugged and I'm back with another chapter for you, glad to see the last one tided you all over until today haha, and glad you all enjoyed the length! Thank you all so much for the wonderful comments, I literally keep rereading them. 
> 
> But, well, enough about me! No warnings for the chapter, onto the fic! Enjoy!

“So this is it then, huh?” Scylla asked. 

Raelle looked at her, pursing her lips. It was. It was the beginning of the end. Raelle’s last run on Red before she was scheduled to return to base, to Fort Salem. Hopefully, without looking back. 

“This is it,” Raelle confirmed, trying to sound casual. She popped open the meal slot, pushing Scylla’s tray through it. 

“You’ve survived your first tour of Cotton Mather. Congratulations, Specialist,” Scylla said with a cheeky smile.

“No thanks to you,” Raelle shot back. 

Pride sparked in Scylla’s eyes. “I’m going to miss this, Specialist Collar. It was a pleasure, truly,”

“Was it?” Raelle asked, rolling her eyes. 

Scylla shrugged, “For me, it was,” suddenly, all pretenses of humor dropped, and she eyed Raelle seriously, “No one has done for me…has been as kind to me, as you have, for a long time. So yes, Raelle. I will miss you. I’ll miss our talks. I’ll miss being treated like I’m worth something, despite what I’ve done. This world would be a little better if we all just showed others a little more kindness. Myself included,”

Raelle shuffled her feet, glancing down as she could feel a blush start to overtake her cheeks. “I didn’t do it for that,” she muttered.

“No, you didn’t. You did it because you’re a good person, and good people see the good in others where the rest of us see nothing. You’re something special. Specialist Collar,” she huffed a laugh at her own joke. 

“I’m alright,”

“No, Raelle,” Raelle looked up at the sudden urgency in Scylla’s voice. 

She looked back at Raelle, her expression deathly serious. “You’re not ‘alright’. You’re one in a million, if not rarer still. Don’t ever forget that. They will try to take it from you: to force you to be like them. Cynical. Lost. Unable to fathom humanity in your enemy. Do not let them,”

Raelle swallowed, surprised by the raw, desperate emotion in Scylla’s voice. 

“I’ll um…I’ll try,”

“Do,” Scylla said seriously. “Don’t let them take what makes you, you. You are so much more powerful than you realize,”

Raelle furrowed her brow. She didn’t know where all of these sudden compliments were coming from, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. 

“Thanks, I guess?”

Scylla’s expression softened, “You don’t believe me,”

“I don’t understand where you’re coming from,”

The corner of Scylla’s lip turned up, and suddenly her fiendish demeanor was back, that spark of mischief back in her eyes. “You will,” she said cryptically. 

Raelle couldn’t help but shake her head, “Always so sure, aren’t you?”

“It’s worked so far,” Scylla shot back, puffing up just a little bit with pride. 

“That ego of yours is going to get you in trouble,” Raelle muttered.

Scylla laughed, “She says to the terrorist in a cell,”

Raelle huffed a laugh despite herself, and they fell into silence, Scylla eventually averting her gaze to stare down thoughtfully at her tray. 

Raelle took her in. Scylla really was…a beautiful woman. Definitely Raelle’s type. A sass-master with a dangerous aura, and somewhere in there…some goodness still left. Raelle could see it. And maybe that’s what Scylla meant, by telling her she was more powerful than she thought: that she could cause herself such delusion, to the point that she was inventing things that weren’t there. Putting her trust in a terrorist, but, well…

It hadn’t gone horribly, thus far. Not that she was planning on doing it anywhere outside of a high-security prison that was literally inescapable. 

She wasn’t stupid, thanks. 

They stayed like that until mealtime was over. Scylla hadn’t touched her food, and pushed the full tray back through the slot.

She looked at Raelle with a mix of nostalgia and that characteristic amusement. 

“Give my best to Alder, if you see her,”

“I won’t,” Raelle said, and Scylla laughed. 

“Probably for the best,”

They fell into silence and Raelle busied herself by taking Scylla’s tray.

“Do you have any other meetings with me, tonight?” Scylla asked, glancing down to the pocket that Raelle had her schedule in.

Raelle raised her eyebrows, surprised only for a moment before shaking her head. She wasn’t going to ask, but-

“It’s the easiest pocket to put it in, and, don’t tell anyone but I hear that it’s actually not impossible to look through concrete…” she squinted in amusement, and Raelle rolled her eyes.

“Watch yourself with that trick. I don’t think they’ll be as cool with it as I was,”

“No promises,” Scylla said with a half-shrug. 

Raelle nodded slowly, taking in Scylla for a moment more. The truth was that no, she didn’t have another scheduled encounter with Detainee Thirteen that evening. Mealtime was the only one, and she was only scheduled for that particular meal time with Thirteen. Her last one would be with Seventy-eight, which she was not looking forward to. 

She surprised herself with her next words, “Take care of yourself, Scylla,” she said, and found she was sincere. 

Scylla’s eyebrows rose, but only a fraction, and Raelle saw her jaw subtly tighten. 

“You too, Raelle,”

Raelle closed the meal slot and, with one last look into those haunting and deep blue eyes, closed the window, too. She sucked in a breath, composing herself. 

It was stupid. She shouldn’t cry because she was leaving behind a person who was a mass-murderer. But…like it or not, they had a connection. It had been a forced one, but Raelle understood Scylla. At their cores, their only difference was that Scylla was willing to do what Raelle would have never been able to. Otherwise…Scylla was right. They were more alike…their causes more aligned, than anyone might realize at first glance. 

In some other life…on some other timeline, in some other universe, where Scylla hadn’t killed so many people…she could see it. She could see herself responding to Scylla’s blatant flirtatious advances. She’d always been a sucker for women that exuded such mysterious confidence, and with dark hair and alluring eyes. In another life…

Raelle shook her head. She couldn’t allow herself to dwell on it, because she wasn’t in another life: she was in her own. And even thinking of the possibility…of entertaining the idea of something more between them than an uneasy understanding…Raelle didn’t want to examine it, because what did it mean? Did it mean she had a willingness to look beyond such a terrible act? To forgive the unforgivable? While she could understand where Scylla was coming from, and she could understand that no one was innocent in war…she couldn’t reconcile such actions with someone she maybe could have come to love, were they ever on the same side. 

She couldn’t let herself think about it, because it was dangerous. Fantasy wasn’t reality, there was no timeline other than the one in which she currently walked, and in that one, Scylla was a terrorist. 

It rang hollow, though, and she tried not to think about it as she collected herself enough to return to her duties. 

\---

It felt different, knowing she was going back home. Or, well…back to Fort Salem. Raelle felt…odd. She felt it as she packed, after returning back from her shift, which, despite being Red, had ended by mid-afternoon. She’d said goodbye to Moffet, who had hugged her tight and told her how much of a pleasure it had been to be her assigned partner. 

“Thanks for making my time here bearable” she’d said, and Raelle had nodded, surprisingly choked up once again. She tried to play it off, and Glory let her, which she appreciated. 

Clearwater wasn’t quite as sentimental, but said goodbye nevertheless the morning after they’d packed, and congratulated her on finishing her tour. 

“Not an easy one, but unless you decide you want to be an Interrogator, probably your last. Wear it with pride, lots of people are terrified of this place,”

“That’s not what I heard,” Raelle said honestly, and Clearwater shrugged.

“They call it grunt work, but you don’t see them fighting over it to get out of deployment, now do you?”

And, well. She wasn’t wrong

They had, like the two day orientation, a one day debriefing. It was nothing crazy: just a meeting and a congratulations for surviving. They were handed their new assignments, and Raelle already knew hers before it was given to her: back to Fort Salem. Still, she couldn’t help but smile when she was handed her paper confirming it. 

She was due for pick up at 11:00. Her helicopter was leaving from Sector H, pad 3, chopper 6. They would have a lot of choppers going out. Raelle felt…content. Glad that it was over. That her rucksack was packed and she could finally head home and see her damn unit. She missed them. Way more, she realized, than she’d allowed herself to notice during her time at Cotton Mather. 

But as she clutched her reassignment papers in her hand and trudged out to Sector H, rucksack on her back and the sun on her skin, she couldn’t help but be…excited, full of elation that she’d finally get to hug them and actually see their expressions as she talked to them about all the craziness of Cotton Mather. 

She was so desperately looking forward to it. 

She slowed in her trudging, recognizing a familiar face coming towards her among the hustle and bustle. 

“Anacostia,” she said, before she could stop herself, and Sgt. Quartermaine raised an eyebrow at the greeting, but Raelle could see her pleasant surprise beneath the put-on sternness. 

“Specialist Collar,” Quartermaine greeted, slowing to a stop in her own walk and eyeing Raelle “I’m glad to see they haven’t broken your spirit here,”

Raelle smiled, “They tried,”

“They’ll do that,” Sgt. Quartermaine said dryly, “Where are you heading to next? Back to Fort Salem?”

“Oh, yeah,” Raelle held up her transfer papers, “I suppose I’ll see you there?”

Sgt. Quatermaine nodded, “I’ll be there soon,”

“What brings you out here?” Raelle asked, and Quartermaine raised her eyebrow. Raelle suddenly realized that it was probably official business and therefore, none of her concern. But Anacostia had been known to ignore protocol sometimes – when it came to the Bellweather unit, especially. If she felt there was information they needed to know…she would usually find a way to get it to them. She’d sort of earned Raelle’s grudging respect, in that way.

She’d started like any other drill sergeant with a boot up their ass, but she’d mentored them, guided them, helped them through War College, and, with time…Raelle had seen her loosen up. 

Especially once Alder had declared all-out war on the Spree. 

Anacostia wasn’t so bad, and she seemed to really have a soft spot for Raelle, and for the others in her unit. It had led to…some sort of bond, though only in passing and never really spoken about. 

“Prisoner transfer,” Anacostia said, after a moment. She held up her own papers in her hand, “Which I am late for. If you’ll excuse me, Specialist,”

Raelle nodded, “Right, sorry, I should get going too-” she said hastily.

Anacostia sent her a small smile, “Relax, Collar. Go. Get home to your unit. They miss you,”

“Thank you ma’am,” Raelle felt herself smile, and Anacostia nodded before continuing on her way. 

Raelle found her helicopter and gratefully threw her bag into the belly of the bird, before pulling herself into it as well and strapping herself down in one of the seats. Others were already there, and the pilot of the chopper asked her for her papers, which she happily showed. 

Once they were all sorted, and everyone accounted for: eight of them total, all heading back to Fort Salem, Raelle settled into her seat as they were given the all clear for takeoff. 

She looked down one last time at Cotton Mather as they flew around, from east to due west, to head back to Massachusetts. 

The camp looked so much smaller, from up there. So much less menacing. 

So much less than what it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Raelle, first Scylla eviscerates her military indoctrination (flimsy as it was) and now she's starting to work through Raelle's carefully constructed defenses against her charm. So you all see the reason there needed to be a sequel then. ;) She's half-way there... 
> 
> Next chapter is the last chapter for this fic, can you believe?? It's been a journey, thank you those of you who have embarked on it with me!


	18. Friends in High Places

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! A later update for you guys, but I was out of town for most of the day so, it is what it is. We've done it! We're at the end of this fic!! It's been a hell of a ride (but the ride isn't even over!) I'm glad so many of you have stuck around for the slow burn, happy to see I'm not the only one who likes to torture themselves haha! 
> 
> No warnings for you, let's just dive right in!

Scylla Ramshorn gently tapped the wall of her cell, bored. Life at Cotton Mather was, honestly, incredibly boring. It also didn’t do the military any favors in her book, but she understood why she had to be transferred there. 

Truly, she’d had very few options. This one was the best (if the most unexpected) of them, and she hadn’t been lying to Raelle when she said that Cotton Mather was an upgrade from her holding cell, all those years back at Fort Salem. 

At least at Cotton Mather, she had a bed. She had books. She had meals that weren’t glass (for the most part). 

Her transfer to Cotton Mather also made sense, because it kept her out of scrutiny. It kept her hidden. It gave her time. 

Not that she thought that Spree would want her dead, necessarily. But they certainly weren’t likely to welcome her back with open arms. With any luck, they would think that the military had executed her. After all: a sentence to Cotton Mather rarely meant anything else. 

She swirled her finger against the concrete, watching through the wall as the guards walked their rounds. 

She liked to use that little trick because it helped pass the time, and it was sometimes fun to watch the guards who had to stand on security door duty. Often, they had to try not to fall asleep, and most weren’t very successful, though both of them at that moment were putting up a valiant effort. The other officers did their door checks. 

Scylla had loved doing her little spying technique when Raelle was around. Raelle had such an…odd way, about her. Like she was just trying to get through her shift. Exasperated, a little annoyed, a little done with it all. It’d been the first thing to really draw Scylla to her. 

After all, most guards didn’t want to be there. Red was the raw deal in Cotton Mather, which was already a bit of a raw deal. But Raelle stood out as not wanting to be there, not at Red nor at Cotton Mather, but there, in general. She exuded a sort of attitude that had tickled Scylla, when she first noticed it. How…delightful. Someone with barely concealed contempt, not necessarily for the prisoners, Scylla’d noticed with her observations, but for _everything_. 

Raelle had been very special indeed, and Scylla tried to ignore the pang in her chest at knowing she likely wouldn’t see Raelle for a while. 

Suddenly, the security door to the left opened. Hobbs and Graves walked down the hall with a purpose, two others following behind them, and, oh. Scylla had seen this formation enough to know what it meant. She raised her eyebrow to herself as they traipsed purposefully down the hallway. 

Someone was getting black-bagged…

And by the looks of it, that someone was her. 

Scylla rolled her eyes to herself but quickly ended her Seeing work. 

She didn’t know what they wanted, but truly, her interrogations were getting irritating. They’d mostly stopped, after a year of “advanced interrogation” methods, because she didn’t break. But every once in a while, they liked to bring her in again. There were other reasons she’d be taken to interrogation, but she was fairly certain she wasn’t due for one of those meetings yet…

Which left just the option of a regular interrogation. Scylla couldn't help but scowl to herself.

She’d been angrier, when she’d first arrived at Corey Isle. It had fueled her and her defiance, and she knew that she had a darkness inside of her that few could stand: she could barely stand it herself. So she’d used it. Dragged them into it, showed them exactly what their morbidly curious minds had wanted to see: that she was a terrorist. That she was the worst of the worst, and that yes, bodies made a noise when they hit the ground from so high up, and it was the sound of nightmares. 

Now, though, she’d had time to reflect. To cool that fire within, leaving behind a solidified resolve, like steel forged from iron: rock forged from magma. Where before she had been fire, now she was brimstone. Both were forces to be reckoned with, though for markedly different reasons. Regardless though, interrogations had never worked on her, so she wasn’t sure why they’d started doing them again. Ever since she’d asked to link with Raelle, the military had been taking her for… “interrogations”…with more frequency than she’d had in a while. But really, it was just punishment. Scylla was used to it, even if she was getting a little sick of it. 

The only upside to all of it was that she had become much more skilled at injuring as many officers as possible during the whole process. It gave her some satisfaction, to do them harm. 

Old habits died hard. 

The knock rang out a moment later and Scylla sighed and stood, getting into position. She decided, smoothing out her prison uniform, that she felt like being a little difficult today, so she simply stood, waiting. 

“Sixteen-hundred!” one of them called. 

Scylla tilted her head. She knew they would be checking her door for any work. 

Predictable. 

“Yes?” she answered, voice purposefully saccharine. She couldn’t actually hear the sigh on the other side, but she knew it well. 

“Inspection,” Hobb’s voice called, and Scylla rolled her eyes to herself.

_Liar_ , she thought, but smiled widely because she knew they could see. “No thanks!” she called back. “I’ve inspected it, looks good! Nothing to even see here, really!”

She knew they would open the door, anyway. She was in position and she had a reputation of being a little unhinged and a bit sarcastic, but not combative over all. At least…not in Terminer. Her reputation among the Interrogators of Oyer was decidedly more tarnished. Thankfully, there seemed to be very little overlap between the camps. 

In fact, excepting that one time she’d given into her impulses and had broken Granada’s nose, she really hadn’t had many incidences during her time in Terminer. She was the picture of a perfect prisoner, for the most part. But that time had been a…moment of weakness, after weeks of grueling interrogation, and Scylla had felt nearly half-mad from the lack of sleep. Having an officer rough-handling her after all of that, even when she said she was in pain…well, at that point, she’d felt justified and more than a little angry. So she just couldn’t help but feel sickly satisfied as she’d felt Granada’s nose break on the back of her head as she’d head-butted her.

Most officers had been very careful of her after that, treating her like a threat where before they had largely ignored her. They’d all been duped into calling her a nickname, for fuck’s sake. They’d all become pretty complacent, until she’d had to go and ruin all of that good faith in one fell swoop. 

It had taken Scylla a while to build her reputation back up, but she had, which was how she liked it. Granada had just never gotten over it, but most other officers, while they didn’t trust her (not like they had before), at least returned to some semblance of uneasy compliance. 

But that was fine. At the end of the day, Scylla didn’t really trust them, and it was healthy (if a bit inconvenient) for them to remain suspicious of her.

Sure enough, the door unlocked a moment later, and Scylla merely stood as the four officers entered her room and grabbed her. 

“Ladies, ladies, please, everyone will get their turn, I know I’m a hot commodity,” Scylla said smoothly as Hobbs started patting down her torso and Graves, her legs. At the same time, she was cuffed: wrists behind her back, and ankles.

She hated those fucking cuffs. 

“You’re hilarious,” Hobbs said dryly, and Scylla beamed at her.

“Thank you, it’s the trauma,”

Hobbs rolled her eyes and in a quick, fluid motion, pushed Scylla forward, into transfer position. 

Scylla hated the position but allowed it, biting her lip to keep herself from reacting. One of the guards kept a firm hold of her wrists, and they slapped the hood over her head immediately. Next came the ear muffs, and they were off. 

Scylla started counting as soon as they started walking. Depending on the interrogators, they would take different routes to Oyer. Once, she’d had an Interrogator named Ailis, who rather enjoyed taking Scylla for walks around the whole compound, which, while useful, had been really fucking annoying. 

Hobbs and Graves tended to not be so extreme in trying to confuse her. They’d take her through a few trap doors that they didn’t know that Scylla knew were there. Sometimes they’d bring her through the Mess Hall and out of Rose Wing, walk her around the building and then bring her into a back entrance to Oyer. Other times, they lead her thrice around Red, before looping around the Mess Hall and heading out through the west point, which was a slightly more direct route to one of the main entrances of Oyer. They would switch it up, but humans were creatures of habit, and she got to know the various routes preferred by the various officers fairly well. 

It seemed they were opting for a more direct route, though it didn’t necessarily seem shorter. Scylla kept counting her footsteps, keeping track of every turn she was directed around. They didn’t bother leading her in circles, instead heading out a side exit between north point and west. Perhaps one of the most direct routes to Oyer, which made sense: north point was Rose Wing. It had the shortest route to Oyer, because Rose Wing detainees were most frequently interrogated. 

They turned her sharply and for a moment, Scylla doubted herself. Before she had a second to reorient herself, she lost all direction. They’d never done that turn before…

It wasn’t hard to change the layout of the camp in her mind to reflect the new direction, but they’d taken a hard right, and she knew Oyer was more to the left. 

Back entrance, then. 

But they didn’t veer, even as they should have. Even as she counted well past the number needed to get them into Oyer via the back entrance. Or to even walk in circles around the building. 

Oh, so she wasn’t…

Oh.

_Oh._

Ah, now she understood. Scylla allowed herself to smile. 

Well. This was a pleasant and unexpected surprise…

They continued, on and on, and Scylla stopped counting. Excepting that one tour of the entire goddamn Terminer complex with Ailis, she’d only ever walked this much once before. 

When she’d arrived. 

They stopped abruptly, whoever was holding her being a bit rough and making Scylla scowl. 

There was some kind of commotion, people talking, probably shaking hands, Scylla didn’t know. But as bodies shifted, someone knocked into her and her ear muffs skewed. Just enough to let her hear, and she wasn’t going to complain about that. 

“Thank you, ladies, truly, for your service. You are doing outstanding work for your country,”

Scylla blanched and rolled her eyes to herself. 

She knew it was a script, but _goddess_ , it sounded too real. She supposed that was why it worked. 

“I can take it from here,”

“Are you sure? She’s a wild one, we may need-”

“Thirteen and I go way back, Lt. Hobbs, so with all due respect: I’ve got it from here, ladies. Thank you, again, for all that you do,”

There was a round of hoorahs and back-patting for having handled the big, scary terrorist and that she was getting what she deserved, etc., and Scylla gagged over having to hear the military circle-jerk, but thankfully, no one heard her. 

She was handed off, her transfer guard – Hobbs, if she had to guess – unhanding her, only for new, strong hands to take over. 

They weren’t very nice hands, either, roughly dragging her forward. Manhandling, really. Putting on a show.

The thought made her smile despite herself.

The rotors were already going on the helicopter, which was good. Scylla felt the wind pick up the closer they got, until she was being pushed into the belly of the beast and guided to a seat before the hands finally released her. A loud slam and the shaking of the chopper signaled they were alone and safe. 

Thank the fucking goddess. Scylla hummed low in her throat, circling a hand over her cuffs until they broke, right as her benefactor reached up behind her and made quick work of her collar, which fell off with a satisfying clank. Ear muffs were pulled off next and Scylla yanked the hood off, immediately pushing her hair out of her eyes with the opposite hand as she flung the hood off to the side. 

“Well, this is a surprise!” she huffed.

Anacostia Quartermaine rolled her eyes and reached forward. 

Gold glinted, even in the low light of the tinted windows of their chopper, and Scylla made a guttural noise of pleasure as she took the lighter from Anacostia. 

“You look like shit,” Anacostia said, in lieu of a greeting, and Scylla snorted. She flicked open the lighter, the fire coming to life like an old friend, and quickly brought it to her face. 

The flames took immediately; cool to the touch and not unlike a nice summer breeze as she manipulated them around her, engulfing her until her disguise was complete.

Scylla flicked the lighter closed. 

“Nice to see you again too, partner.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooohhhh, they're in cahoots!! 👀👀 Ahahaha I feel like more than one of you picked up on where this was going, but now both Scylla and Raelle are free from the confines of Cotton Mather, not that Raelle knows that...
> 
> Anyway, I'll leave you off there! Drop a line if you enjoyed the chapter/fic! This has been a joy to write and share with you all, I'm so pleased people are enjoying/enjoyed it, and I'll see you in a few days for the sequel!


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